The vote for strike action by 10,000 ambulance drivers who are members of the GMB union is more about public safety than about pay, insists the union. How it will benefit patients to have ambulance drivers go on strike is a little hard to fathom. Particularly so as the GMB has chosen to call a strike at a time when ambulance response times are the longest they have been at any time since records started to be kept in their current form in 2017.
In many ways the NHS seems to be coping a lot less well now that it was at the height of the pandemic. The latest statistics on ambulance response times, for October, certainly bear this out.
Ambulance calls are divided into four categories. Category 1 is for ‘life-threatening’ conditions, which, according to an NHS video, include cardiac arrest and severe allergic reactions. The average response time in October for this category of call was 9 minutes 56 seconds, with the 90th percentile waiting time at 17 minutes 42 seconds.
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