Haverhill councillors call on East of England Ambulance Service to improve response times for the town
Haverhill Town Council’s ambulance subgroup says it is disappointed at the lack of improvement for the response times for the town despite changes made last October.
The subgroup was set up to press for improved ambulance response times for Haverhill and met again with the CEO and the head of operations of East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust (EEAST) on March 3.
At the October meeting, as reported by the Echo, the subgroup learned that EEAST had moved Haverhill to level 1 on the System Status Plan for South Cambridgeshire, the priority list of locations for relocating any free ambulances.
Over the 12 months leading up to last October, Cambridge’s average C1 response time was 7.3 minutes, very close to the national target of 7 minutes, but Haverhill’s was twice as much, at 14.7 minutes.
C1 is life-threatening injuries and illnesses that require immediate intervention or resuscitation.
Cllr Alan Stinchcombe, from the subgroup, had expressed doubt that the the move to level 1 would make much of an improvement as an ambulance could easily be diverted to an emergency call while en route to the town.
And the latest figures obtained by Cllr Stinchcombe show that the average C1 response times in January for Haverhill was 14.39 minutes and 6.24 mins for Cambridge.
After last week’s meeting, he said: “The data I’ve seen suggest that there may have been a large increase in ambulances arriving to standby at Haverhill ambulance station between December and January, but the gap between Haverhill’s Category 1 (C1) mean (average) response time and Cambridge’s only widened, with Haverhill’s January figure reaching a staggering 2.3 times that of Cambridge.
“So, I’m still not convinced that promotion on the priority list alone will deliver the goods whenever ambulance availability is low.”
Cllr Tony Brown, another member of the ambulance subgroup, said: “EEAST presents Haverhill’s unacceptably long response times as just an unfortunate consequence of the town being so far from a hospital, but it has a duty to provide equitable service across the localities its serves as far as reasonably possible and it’s been failing in that duty since it removed tethered cover by a rapid response vehicle from the town at the end of 2021.”
Cllr Stinchcombe said the trust’s standby priority list only serves to ‘guarantee long response times for Haverhill’ and that it ‘helps to keep down the trust’s average response times at the town’s expense’.
Cllr Brown added: “Hospitals deliver ambulances to larger centres of population, so their populations are always well served. I would argue that patients further away should have priority.
“Their outcomes are potentially worse due to long times both waiting for an ambulance and then getting to a hospital.
“Increased ambulance availability may have contributed to the welcome drop in Haverhill’s C1 response times in February (9.01 mins) compared with January (14.39), but EEAST didn’t tell us about any extra action it may have taken to bring this about.
“What we need is a change in the trust’s dispatch procedure to reassure us that however many or few ambulances are available, Haverhill will always get a fair share of whatever is available.”
An East of England Ambulance Service spokesperson said: “We understand Haverhill councillors’ concerns and are committed to improving response times for the town.
“Haverhill already has a fair proportion of ambulances assigned to it - of the 18 double-staffed ambulances in South Cambridgeshire, 16 per cent are based at Haverhill although only 9 per cent of C1 calls and 11 per cent of C2 calls in south Cambridgeshire come from Haverhill.
“We have changed our system status plan to prioritise ambulances to be sent back to Haverhill, resulting in faster response times.
“Between November 2024 and this February, Haverhill’s C1 response times (our most urgent patients) have dropped from 15:24 minutes to 10:16 minutes. C2 responses have dropped from 59:43 minutes to 48:07 minutes.”
