Ambulance response times for the most critical call-outs continue to underperform targets which were lowered as recently as this year, new figures show.
Data released to Sinn Féin shows that in July, August and September just 45 per cent of life-threatening calls involving cases other than cardiac or respiratory arrest are being responded to within a target of 19 minutes.
And in Dublin, just 37 per cent of calls meet this deadline.
The HSE’s target is that half of the calls are responded to before this window elapses – which itself was lowered for 2022 in the HSE’s service plan from its previous level of 70 per cent.
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David Cullinane, the party’s health spokesman, accused the HSE of reducing its targets for emergency response time “because Government does not have a plan to hit them, or a plan to train, recruit and retain enough paramedics”.
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The HSE data shows that for Echo calls – the term used when a patient is suffering life threatening cardiac or respiratory arrest – the national figure for compliance with the 19-minute response time was 76 per cent. The target is that 80 per cent of calls are responded to in this time, but in the worst-performing region in the west of the country, just 66 per cent of calls met the deadline.
Mr Cullinane said a recent capacity review of the ambulance service showed a need of more than 2,000 additional staff to double its complement in the next five years.
“Yet there is no plan from the Minister or the HSE on how to reach these targets, or how much it will cost to deliver a properly functioning ambulance service.
“Paramedics are burned out and overworked, yet ambulance response times for cardiac and respiratory arrest are behind target, and call-outs for other life-threatening incidents are so far below target that the HSE had moved the goalposts,” he said.
Mr Cullinane said the budget for 2023 earmarked €4.5 million additional funding for the ambulance service when at least €16 million was needed.
In response to queries, the HSE said the “current deployment model is designed around international best practice and has eliminated previous practices where the nearest ambulance was not always dispatched due to former legacy boundaries”.
It said the National Ambulance Service is developing clinical indicators to assess performance alongside the time-based targets. “[They] include, the return of spontaneous circulation in cardiac arrest patients at arrival to the emergency department, the management of severe pain and two indicators related to stroke care with more envisioned to be added in 2023.″
It said that response time targets are impacted by high demand for services and the continued response to Covid, as well as an “urgent need to recruit additional staff as, currently, recruitment efforts are being surpassed by service demand”.
“The scale of growth in demand is unprecedented and unexpected with a 14 per cent growth since 2019, the last year from which we can develop reliable calculations that have not been skewed by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is a significant jump on the growth rate prior to 2019, which was about 3 per cent per year.”
