[morrbo]

Sorry, but this is just wrong. There is absolutely no way that an average wait time - usually 7 minutes - for a cat 1 call will be 48 hours. Unless someone made a heinous mistake and somehow forgot a call one time, it never "on occasion" goes to 48 hours. As soon as it goes over a relatively small number (30 mins odd) they start bringing in other districts to help.

Are you really telling me that we just decided to let people die for 2 days straight? Got any proof on that one?

[MagicMoonlight]

Lmao which area do you think has ambulances to send? There’s nothing available anywhere.

[morrbo]

To actually answer your question and not bow to the HN-is-reddit comment above: London draws on Kent/other surrounding areas temporarily... big cities (usually) feed into small ones. This (usually) is how it works. In the case of COVID we saw 999 response units being shipped all over the country, including call handlers (ie. England handling Scotland's calls) and response units. There are SO many plans in place for this/time-slip/major incident handling that it's mind boggling.

Source: worked for the NHS, still alive despite there being 48 hour cat 1 waits and no ambulances in the entire country.

[stuaxo]

Lots of cuts to services over a decade before COVID.

Then COVID came and routine treatment is paused, and now yes - we are in a situation where people aren't getting ambulances and at the same time ambulances are piling up outside hospitals as there is no space to take patients.

TLDR - yes, outlet government has been running down the health service to the point people are dying.

[jodrellblank]

It is wrong; see NHS Confederation[1] saying:

"In January, the average response time for a category 1 incident (where an immediate response is required to a life-threatening condition such as a cardiac arrest) was 8 minutes and 31 seconds. Although this is an improvement from the four preceding months, which were all over 9 minutes, the average across 2019 for comparison was 7 minutes and 12 seconds, and the ‘standard’ is 7 minutes.

This is even more pertinent for category 2 incidents, which include strokes and require rapid assessment and/or urgent transport and the standard is 18 minutes. In January this was over 38 minutes, and it passed 50 minutes in October and December. Although the standard was not regularly met pre-pandemic, the average across 2019 was still 23 minutes."

There's a muddled statistic from BBC News here[2]:

"Average waits of more than 90 minutes to reach emergency calls such as heart attacks - five times longer than the target time - with waits of over 150 minutes in some regions. Response times for the highest priority calls, such as cardiac arrests, taking close to 11 minutes - four minutes longer than they should"

(I don't know a difference between "heart attack" and "cardiac arrest".)

"The Royal College of Emergency Medicine believes up to 500 people a week could be dying because of the problems accessing emergency care."

But there are news articles of individual much longer waits:

"When Martin Clark, 68, started suffering with chest pains at home in East Sussex in November, his wife immediately called an ambulance. But none came. She phoned another three times before her and her son decided to drive Martin to hospital themselves 45 minutes later." - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64243044

"More than half of Staffordshire's ambulances queue outside Stoke hospital on New Year's Eve [...] Some Category One calls - like heart attacks or anaphylactic shocks - have taken him 25 minutes to respond to, compared to a target time of around seven minutes due to a lack of available vehicles because of the queues." - https://news.sky.com/story/more-than-half-of-countys-ambulan... -

"A Grimsby woman thought to be having a stroke had to wait eight hours for an ambulance - and spent a further eight hours in the back of it outside hospital waiting to be seen." - https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/news/grimsby-news/distrau...

"A Southend pensioner was left waiting eight hours outside a hospital after a 48 hour delay for an ambulance [for a fall and cut head]." - https://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/20205197.southend-pensioner...

[1] https://www.nhsconfed.org/articles/what-latest-data-tell-us-...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64254249