Dangerous ambulance service lies in Britain

Ambulance staff in Wiltshire routinely and systematically altered data to make it look as if the service was meeting targets. A report from the Audit Commission found that in less than 15 months between April 2005 and July 2006 staff altered the timing of 594 emergency calls to make it appear that ambulances had reached callers within the target of eight minutes. Staff also altered the details of 89 lower-priority calls, which are supposed to be reached in 19 minutes. Many changes were made to call categories to make results look better.

Despite these changes, Wiltshire Ambulance Service (now amalgamated into Great Western Ambulance Service) failed to meet the targets for either the “immediately life-threatening” category A calls or the “serious” category B calls. Three quarters of category A calls are supposed to be reached within eight minutes, and 95 per cent of category B calls within 19 minutes. In 2005-06, Wiltshire Ambulance Trust scored 71.2 per cent and 91.4 per cent respectively.

Richard Lott, the auditor, said: “The key performance indicator for ambulance trusts is how quickly the ambulance arrives. It is crucially important that the public has confidence in the integrity of the data.” Last August the Department of Health admitted widespread altering of ambulance figures. A report showed that six out of 31 trusts had misreported response times. Wiltshire was not among them.

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Fatal ambulance delay in Australia

A young Australian soldier is heartbroken following the death of his fiancee and unborn baby, after a wait of more than 20 minutes for an ambulance. Trooper Sean Graham, who has seen active service for his country overseas, says his cherished partner and baby might still be alive if paramedics reached them more quickly. Mikaela Meagher, 22, died in Austin Hospital on March 21 after losing consciousness two days earlier during an epileptic seizure in the bath at her sister's home in the central Victorian town of Maryborough.

Mikaela was pregnant with Cohen Thomas Graham, who was due to have been born on the day of her seizure. Mr Graham, 23, told how he and Mikaela were looking after her sister's three children on the evening of March 19 when the double tragedy unfolded. "Mikaela's nephew went into the bathroom to tell her to hurry up because he wanted to play with his frisbee, then ran out saying she was playing under the water," Mr Graham said. He found Mikaela unconscious, began performing CPR and phoned the emergency services.

"They kept saying 'It's not going to be long, not long now'," he said. It was at least 20 minutes between the call being made and the first paramedics arriving, he said. According to Mr Graham, paramedics had to leave a man who had suffered a heart attack with a doctor in Dunolly and travelled the 22km distance to the Maryborough emergency at 160km/h.

Paramedics said Maryborough and the surrounding towns had one vehicle on duty. Sources said the team, when called to the Dunolly job, warned the Rural Ambulance Victoria control centre in Ballarat to find cover in case of another emergency, but that no action was taken. "If the paramedics had been able to get there within five minutes they were confident the outcome could have been different," one ambulance officer said. Cohen was pronounced dead when Mikaela reached Maryborough Hospital.

Mikaela, whose heart had been revived, was flown to the Austin, but with minuscule activity in her brain, her life-support machine was switched off on March 21. Many of her organs were donated to help save others.

Mr Graham has called for an investigation into resourcing and management procedures relating to the tragedy and a wider probe of the service. "If they had been there in just a few minutes I believe it might have been different," he said. "The paramedics were fantastic, but the ambulance service needs more resources. "I cannot bring Mikaela and Cohen back, but I don't want anything like this to happen to anyone else," Mr Graham said.

The RAV was restructured this year after being plagued by claims of inadequate resourcing, mismanagement, bullying, sexual harassment and cronyism. Though the target for metropolitan ambulances is to attend within nine minutes for most cases, there is no target response time for rural ambulances.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

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