Ambulances are beginning to reach critically ill and injured people more quickly, but less sick people are still seeing long waits.
South Western Ambulance Service has been struggling to get to C1, those deemed to have the most life-threatening conditions, patients within the national seven minute target.
In March, paramedics were taking an average of nearly ten 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.
Since March, response times for C1 patients have dropped and June data shows paramedics are now reaching patients in under 8 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.”
It took an average of more than 25 minutes to get to less serious C2 cases. The target is 18 minutes.
It also came in far above targets for C3 and C4 cases. In both cases it was among the worst in the country with many of the least serious C4 patients waiting nearly six hours for an ambulance.
Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group which oversees NHS services in the area praised South Western Ambulance Service for improving its C1 response time.
The South West ambulance service covers Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and the former Avon area, including Bristol and Bath.
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.
