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Ambulance figures improve

Critically ill people are being reached faster

South Western Ambulance Service has been struggling to get to those deemed to have the most life-threatening conditions within the national seven-minute target.

In March paramedics were taking an average of nearly 10 minutes to reach the patients, who could be having heart attacks or may have catastrophic injuries. At the end of last year the figures were even worse.

But since March, the response times for critically ill patients have dropped, and June data shows paramedics are now reaching patients in under eight minutes – which used to be the national target until it was lowered to seven minutes in September last year.

A spokesman for the service said: “South Western Ambulance Service has been working exceptionally hard to improve its performance. 

“We are continuing to demonstrate a week-on-week improvement in our response times for our most critical and seriously ill patients, and we have robust plans in place to continue this improvement across all categories of patients. 

“We will continue to work with our strategic partners to negotiate further resources to enable us to deliver the highest-quality response to patients.”

For England as a whole, response times improved for the most critically-ill patients, although only two ambulance services managed to hit the seven-minute target.

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