Patients in rural areas wait 50% longer for ambulances

EMBARGO: Immediate Release

• Freedom of Information requests reveal stark rural urban divide in ambulance delays.

• Heart attack and stroke victims in some rural areas facing waits of one hour 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

• Waits for life-threatening calls are 45% longer in rural areas than urban ones

New figures uncovered by the Liberal Democrats have revealed a stark rural and urban divide over dangerous ambulance delays, with heart attack victims in some areas waiting over one hour and forty minutes.

The analysis showed that on average, people in rural areas are waiting 12 minutes for an ambulance to arrive for Category One calls, 45% longer than in urban areas. For Category Two calls average waits in rural areas were one hour and one minute, 17% higher than in urban ones.

Seven of ten ambulance trusts in England provided figures on average ambulance waits last year broken down by local area, in response to a Freedom of Information request from the Liberal Democrats.

In Lincolnshire the average wait for a Category 2 call - which can include heart attack and stroke victims - was one hour and forty minutes. This is over four times longer than the shortest average wait for Category 2 calls of 22 minutes in Oxford.

Patients in South West Norfolk faced the longest delays for life-threatening calls (Category one), with an average wait of over 16 minutes, more than double the target of seven minutes. This compares to an average wait of just 6 minutes 40 seconds in Bedford.

The other areas with the worst delays for Category One calls were all rural areas in Norfolk and Suffolk, followed by West Oxfordshire and North East Cambridgeshire.

Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey will be visiting North Norfolk today on his local elections tour, where he will be calling for a rescue plan for local health services in rural areas. He will warn that entire communities in the countryside are being cut off from access to vital healthcare, from ambulances to GPs.

The Liberal Democrats are also calling for a wider rescue plan for local health services, including recruiting 8,000 more GPs and bringing in a Carer’s Minimum Wage to tackle staff shortages in social care. This would help reduce pressure on overstretched hospitals and ambulance services.

Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey said:

“Lengthy ambulance delays can have devastating consequences for patients. It is heartbreaking that people living in rural areas are being left waiting in distress and pain for over an hour longer than if they lived in a city. 

“Entire rural communities are increasingly being cut off from the basic health services they need, from getting an ambulance on time to seeing their local GP or dentist. It’s just another example of this government taking rural areas for granted and allowing the NHS crisis to spiral out of control.

“We urgently need a rescue plan for health services in rural areas, starting by recruiting extra GPs and social care workers to take pressure off ambulance services and A&Es.”

ENDS

Notes to Editor

First reported in the Telegraph

Full data broken down by local area can be found here. The data was provided by seven in ten ambulance services in England. South East Central, South West and North West ambulance services didn’t provide data in time.

Each area was categorised as “predominantly urban”, “predominantly rural” or “urban with significant rural” using DEFRA’s “Rural Urban Classification” for local authorities and former NHS clinical commissioning groups, available here.