An immediate medical response to a heart attack, stroke or serious accident can mean the difference between life and death, yet here in Wales, despite the tireless hardwork of paramedics and other NHS staff, four out of every ten ambulances are failing to arrive at life-threatening emergencies within the Welsh Labour Government's target time.
Whilst latest figures show that Welsh Ambulance response times for such cases have improved recently they still fall short of key targets.
I welcome any improvement in performance and all credit to the staff who have helped achieve it, but we can’t ignore the fact that while we have seen some progress, the target is still being missed and Wales has amongst the worst ambulance response times in Britain.
By the end of June this year, 61.4 per cent of emergency responses to immediately life-threatening calls arrived at the scene within eight minutes, according to the Welsh Government’s own statistics.
The target is 65 per cent – the lowest in the UK. It’s now been missed for 20 consecutive months and met just once in the last three years - it is a national scandal.
Communities will rightly question these missed targets and the huge variations in performance across the country remain a matter of huge concern.
In England, ambulance services have a more ambitious target of responding to 75% of Category A calls within eight minutes. The target was met for England as a whole in 2013-14 for the most serious of those calls - Red 1.
Response times in Wales remain wide of the mark and it’s putting lives at risk. Axing hospital beds, closing minor injuries units and community hospitals, and jam packed emergency departments are all taking their toll and contributing to this poor performance. With ambulances stuck in queues, large swathes of Wales are being left without adequate ambulance cover as ambulances are called to places far from their bases.
In some cases, patients are being forced to wait for hours outside A&E units that are too busy to deal with them as paramedics are only allowed to hand patients over to hospitals when staff there can take charge of them and regrettably, some have suffered the indignity of passing away in the back of a vehicle - this can’t go on!
On the very same day that the latest figures on response times were published, the Welsh Health Minister announced proposalsto drop targets for ambulance response times in Wales for all but the most life-threatening calls.
The plan is to move away from time-based performance measures. In a one-year trial from October, performance for less urgent incidents will be assessed by clinical outcomes - the results of the treatment delivered.
The target of responding to 65% of very urgent calls within eight minutes will remain in place but be monitored.
The service has also announced that fewer calls will be classed as "red", which need an eight-minute response. Currently 500 calls a day are categorised under the most serious category of red but under the new system only around 150 a day will be still subject to an eight minute target.
While a new approach to targets is something I welcome, Welsh Ministers must ensure that we are able to benchmark performance with other parts of the UK. These changes will only be effective if they lead to improved ambulance performance. That’s what communities and hard-pressed staff deserve and that’s what Welsh Government must now deliver with its new model.
Some have pointed out that scrapping targets which are not being met is politically convenient for a Government that has been on the ropes over the performance of the NHS in recent years. That's why I can't help but feel that it would have been better to make changes only once targets were being consistently met.
Patients and their families must have confidence that in life-threatening emergencies, they can dial 999 and will receive a very swift response and people across Wales need to know that NHS services here are at least as good, if not better than elsewhere in the UK. The problem is that in the future, if Welsh Labour Ministers continue to adopt performance measures which other parts of the UK don't, it is going to be nigh on impossible to compare our services with others. I'll leave you to work out to whose advantage that might be.