Ambulance call out times improve
Thursday, 25th November 1999.
AMBULANCE chiefs are celebrating the East Anglian Ambulance Service's best-ever response performance to 999 calls.
In October the service, which covers Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk, reached just over 94 per cent of patients within 19 minutes and just under 46 per cent within 8 minutes.
The average response time for last month was nine minutes and 37 seconds compared with nine minutes and 54 seconds in September.
John Ashbourne, chief executive of the trust, said "After the unprecedented high demand of the summer, the October figures are a credit to our front-line crews and staff in the emergency communications centre and demonstrate the clear relationship between the number of 999 calls and our response time performance."
The service responded to an average of 282 999 calls a day last month, compared with 291 in September and 295 in August.
In March, the trust was rapped in an independent report which criticised its emergency response times and one month later a new communications system was introduced.
But as reported in the News, the system failed for almost two hours on Friday night.
Staff were forced to switch to emergency back-up measure with mobile phones used to keep in touch with ambulance crews.
In October the service, which covers Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk, reached just over 94 per cent of patients within 19 minutes and just under 46 per cent within 8 minutes.
The average response time for last month was nine minutes and 37 seconds compared with nine minutes and 54 seconds in September.
John Ashbourne, chief executive of the trust, said "After the unprecedented high demand of the summer, the October figures are a credit to our front-line crews and staff in the emergency communications centre and demonstrate the clear relationship between the number of 999 calls and our response time performance."
The service responded to an average of 282 999 calls a day last month, compared with 291 in September and 295 in August.
In March, the trust was rapped in an independent report which criticised its emergency response times and one month later a new communications system was introduced.
But as reported in the News, the system failed for almost two hours on Friday night.
Staff were forced to switch to emergency back-up measure with mobile phones used to keep in touch with ambulance crews.
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