EXCLUSIVE: Data reveals the long waits to get through to East Midlands Ambulance Service on 999
The longest wait to get through to a call handler was 7 and a half minutes.
Last updated 12th Jan 2023
We can exclusively reveal East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) call handlers are taking more than 5 minutes to answer some 999 calls - with the longest taking over 7 and a half minutes.
Data we obtained from the service reveals between January and October 2022, almost 25.000 calls took longer than one minute to answer.
“You would expect within seconds really to be speaking to someone, so the fact it looks to be pretty common to be waiting for many minutes is quite extraordinary,” says John Puntis, a former consultant paediatrician and co-chair of Keep our NHS Public.
“This is a reflection of the huge pressures the ambulance service is under.”
The data below reveals the longest time it took for EMAS call handlers to answer a 999 call each month:
Jan-22 - 00:06:17
Feb-22 - 00:06:07
Mar-22 - 00:06:27
Apr-22 - 00:07:32
May-22 - 00:06:19
Jun-22 - 00:06:50
Jul-22 - 00:05:47
Aug-22 - 00:06:46
Sep-22 - 00:04:49
Oct-22 - 00:05:27
The data also reveals how many callers waited longer than one minute to get through:
Jan-22 - 1,348
Feb-22 - 975
Mar-22 - 3,721
Apr-22 - 4,505
May-22 - 2,202
Jun-22 - 2,407
Jul-22 - 3,051
Aug-22 - 2,830
Sep-22 - 1,637
Oct-22 - 2,206
John says it all feeds into a much wider problem of the health service being under-resourced.
“It starts with underinvestment and lack of social care," he said.
“That’s why you have around 10- to 12,000 patients in hospital who are well enough medically to go home but who cannot be discharged because of lack of community support.
“That means patients in A&E who need to go to the ward can’t be moved because there isn’t a bed. That means A&E is full. It also means people then can’t be transferred from an ambulance into A&E, so they wait. And the ambulance crews are then tied up and unable to answer the emergency calls.”
He says staff are increasingly suffering with depression, anxiety and stress because they’re not able to provide the level of care that they want to provide.
It comes as Yorkshire Ambulance staff including call handlers are currently voting on whether to take strike action over pay.
Speaking yesterday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak insisted the £8bn package set out in the Chancellor’s autumn statement for NHS and social care last week would tackle some of the problems facing the health service.
Strategic Commander for EMAS Richard Lyne said:
"We are asking members of the public to be responsible for their own health and think very carefully about what they can do to care for themselves at home or use NHS 111 online to determine which NHS service is right for them before asking for help.
“This will enable us to continue to focus on getting to those patients who really need us in a life-threatening emergency such as a cardiac arrest or experiencing a stroke."
East Midlands Ambulance Service have also told us:
"During 2021/2022, we received 1,267,624 emergency and urgent calls.
"The year before (2020/2021) we received 999,144 emergency and urgent calls.
"This has resulted in EMAS receiving an additional 268,480 calls (26% increase) within the same period 12-month period.
"Despite this, EMAS is one of the best performing ambulance trusts in terms of call pick up times, and takes calls for other ambulance services on a daily basis - this happens when a call to another service has been waiting five or more minutes to be answered in another part of the country.
"Proactive steps taken by EMAS in response to the increased demand and higher levels of activity being experienced on the service
"increased our Emergency Operations Centre team by over 50 colleagues before Christmas 2021, thanks to national funding.
"Recruitment of additional 999 call handlers continued throughout 2022, with an increase of 60 call handlers.
"As a result, our two EMAS control rooms continue to have the best response times in the country, with an average call pick-up rate of just seven seconds."