West Midlands NO! Campaign

As predicted by West Midlands NO!, Shropshire Ambulance Service and anyone else with an ounce of common sense, the regionalisation of the Ambulance Service in the West Midlands has proved disasterous with only 65% of emergency 999 calls in Shropshire being responded to within 8 minutes.

The British government’s minimum target is 75%.

I have first hand experience of the consequences of unnecessary centralisation in the Ambulance Service.  A few weeks ago I was going to hospital in Oswestry in north Shropshire and stopped to help someone who needed help at the side of the road.  It turned out he was having a heart attack.  The ambulance took 15 minutes to get from the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital - the nearest A&E department - to Oswestry.  A couple of miles up the road is Gobowen Hospital where I was going but the A&E department was closed a few years ago in favour of a centralised A&E service in Shrewsbury.  The man died on the side of the road in front of me two minutes before the ambulance arrived.

When I phoned the ambulance I got through to a control room in the West Midlands, not nearby Shrewsbury.  I had to describe where the man was and they had to look it up on a map.  Valuable time was wasted doing this and in asking several times for road names or numbers.  Someone in the control room in Shrewsbury would have known the place I was describing - it’s a major road and the local landmarks are well known in that end of the county.

The loss of local knowledge in the 999 control rooms is a major blow for Shropshire but compared to Stafford, the county is relatively local to Brierley Hill where the Ambulance Service has its great big control room.  There’s at least a possibility that the person taking the call will have heard of some of the places they’re being told about but the further from the centre you get, the less likely that is.

The Ambulance Service is refusing to acknowledge that the drive for regionalisation is the cause of the life-threatening jump in response times, blaming “an unprecedented increase in category A emergency calls” for the poor performance.

Let’s be clear here - it is not the fault of the emergency operators who do the best possible job they can to save lives in spite of the poor judgement of their management.  The blame lies squarely at the feet of the management of the Ambulance Service and the politicians that continue to force the square peg of regionalisation into the round hole of real life.