A UK consultancy firm has claimed that Ireland is “too rural” to meet target ambulance response times.
Reports by the Health Information And Quality Authority (HIQA) have regularly found that ambulance response times, particularly in rural areas, fall well below recommended targets.
By HIQA standards, 80 per cent of potentially life-threatening calls should be dealt with by a first responder within eight minutes but latest figures show that just 26.6 per cent were responded to within this time. In rural areas, the response was much slower with just 6.6 per cent of calls being responded to within the target time.
This has lead to calls for the HSE to re-examine the distribution and protocol surrounding ambulance services in Ireland but a new report by UK consultancy Lightfoot Solutions has now claimed that the service “cannot possibly achieve” such targets, even if fully resourced and operating to international best practice.
According to the Irish Times, Ireland’s “high rurality” and the fact that Irish people are less than half as likely to call an ambulance than people in England means the cost of running the service here is significantly higher by comparison.
The report also found that the country’s ambulance stations are not well located for the communities they serve and as a result, the average drive times in urban areas are nearly ten minutes, compared to four minutes in other countries.
However, it also stated that providing extra resources would result in “very little improvement” in performance in rural areas, as solutions such as community first responders using a defibrillator would be best suited in areas where only one emergency call is made per week.
