Issue - meetings

        The Board was advised that the following question had been received:-

We have an ambulance station within one minute from our address.  WHY did it take an ambulance and paramedic car 25 minutes to reach my grandson when he had a heart attack.  His brain was starved for 1 hr 17 minutes and despite the efforts of the ambulance and 1^st response crew and hospital, he died 2 days later.

If the ambulance had come from OUR ambulance station instead of one 25 minutes away, he may have had a better chance of survival and would not be leaving his young children without a daddy.

I am not blaming the ambulance or 1^st response crew as they worked as hard as they could to keep him with us but the question still is:-

WHAT PURPOSE DOES OUR LOCAL AMBULANCE STATION ACHIEVE FOR ITS LOCAL COMMUNITY WHEN IT CAN'T SEND AN AMBULANCE TO A PATIENT 1 MINUTE AWAY FROM WHERE IT IS.

Response

The North West Ambulance Service would like to offer its sincere condolences to the member of the public concerned and her family and is very sorry that she was not happy with the service received from the Trust.

We are unable to comment on individual incidents in a public forum however, we would like to reassure the member of the public concerned that we take all complaints very seriously and if she would like to pass on her details to us, we will look into the incident and provide some personal feedback.

With regard to the question about ambulance stations, we can give a general response about how ambulances are despatched. Our ambulance stations act as a base for staff and vehicles, and shifts start and end at these locations, however, due to the high activity, staff rarely return to their base once they have taken a patient to hospital.

When a patient calls ‘999’ the control centres despatch the nearest resource to the incident, no matter where that resource started its shift from. For example if an ambulance based at Widnes station took a child to Alder Hey Hospital, while on its way back to the Widnes area, if it was the nearest ambulance to an incident in Liverpool, it could be sent to that incident.

Other than for scheduled rest breaks, vehicles are continually mobile and are despatched from the road. It is unlikely that an ambulance will return to its base station during the shift, going from patient to hospital, straight to the next patient and so on.

RESOLVED: That the question and the response be noted.