NHS figures show that almost a million people waited at least half an hour for an ambulance after having a medical emergency such as a heart attack or stroke last year. Under NHS guidelines, ambulances are meant to arrive at incidents involving a medical emergency – known as category 2 calls – within 18 minutes.
Ambulance crews responding to 999 calls in England took more than 30 minutes to reach patients needing urgent care a total of 905,086 times during 2019-20. Of those, 253,277 had to wait at least an hour, and 35,960 – the equivalent of almost 100 patients a day – waited for more than two hours.
In addition to heart attacks and strokes, the figures cover patients who had sustained a serious injury or trauma or major burns, or had developed the potentially lethal blood-borne infection sepsis.
Full story in The Guardian, 16 August 2020