Ambulance strikes won’t improve record waiting times

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 90^th percentile waiting time at 17 minutes 42 seconds. These figures are up from 9 mins 20 seconds and 16 mins 25 seconds in October 2021. In January 2021, at the hight of the second wave of the pandemic, when emergency admissions for Covid hit a peak, the corresponding times were 7 minutes 38 seconds and 13 minutes 26 seconds.    

It ought to be noted that ambulance response times are not just a function of NHS efficiency and the load on the NHS; they are also partly down to traffic. In January 2021, the country was in the depths of the third lockdown, and so there was little to hold up ambulances. Nevertheless, what is more alarming than the rise in response times to category 1 calls is those for the lower categories. Category 2 is defined as ‘emergency calls’, which might include burns, epilepsy and strokes. The average waiting times for an ambulance for calls in this category was 1 hour and 1 minute, with the 90^th percentile wait at 2 hours 16 minutes. In January 2021, the mean response time was 29 minutes 40 seconds and the 90^th percentile wait was one hour and 4 minutes. In other words, stroke victims now appear to be waiting more than twice as long for an ambulance as they were at the height of the pandemic.

For category 3, which includes ‘late-stage labour, non-severe burns and diabetes’ the mean waiting time in October 2022 was 3 hours 34 minutes, with the 90^th percentile at 8 hours 49 minutes. If that is the response time for late-stage labour, it makes you wonder how many babies are being delivered at home as a result of failed emergency calls. As for category 4 – which includes ‘diarrhoea, vomiting and urine infections’ – the mean waiting time in October 2022 was 4 hours and a minute, with the 90^th percentile at 9 hours 54 minutes. These waiting times are nearly twice what they were at the peak of the pandemic in January 2021. 

We are forever being told the NHS is ‘in crisis’, in spite of very hefty increases in its budget in recent years. If these are the response times of ambulances attending emergencies it makes you wonder whether we any longer have a comprehensive emergency health service worthy of the name. It is far from clear why the ambulance service suddenly finds itself so unable to cope. But calling a strike certainly isn’t going to help matters.