Just 40 per cent of 111 calls answered in a minute

Service to be taken over next week

Health bosses have been grilled over slow response times to emergency calls and patients being left for hours in ambulances outside hospitals.

Members of Plymouth City Council’s overview and scrutiny committee demanded answers from health chiefs this week after it was revealed only two in every five of all calls to the 111 service are answered within a minute and South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) has among the longest ambulance waiting times in the country for emergency calls.

Director of commissioning at NHS Devon, Jo Turi admitted the service is “not where it should be” and said there would be some major changes to the 111 service.

Earlier plans for the management of the 111 service to be transferred from the current provider, Devon Doctors, to the Practice Plus Group (PPG), England’s largest independent provider of NHS services, will happen next week rather than in October, as originally scheduled.

Some councillors have doubts whether this will improve the service. Cllr Lee Finn (Cons, Budshead) asked: “It’s been five years since it’s been noted by the public and stakeholders that the services has fallen quite badly. What can you say to actually assure us that this five years is at an end and this is a new chapter in your existence?”

Ms Turi said she was confident things would improve under PPG.

“The sustainability of having a large scale provider like PPG who can utilise the different services and the different call centres that they’ve got around the patch, I think will enable a much more sustainable service,” she said.

“And I think that’s the big difference for me.  We were going for something that’s very local and I think we’re all supportive and wanted Devon Doctors and wanted it to succeed in that.

“But [it’s going] to a provider that I think has got a lot of experience in this area.”

Ambulance response times are also under scrutiny after recent figures showed “category 2” call outs – or patients suffering conditions such as strokes, difficulty breathing or chest pain – frequently have to wait over two hours for paramedics.  The target time is just 18 minutes.

SWASFT’s county commander David Harper told councillors they face huge problems when taking patients to Derriford Hospital (University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust) and Torbay, with long delays getting people seen.

“The average handover time is now exceeding three hours. This is limiting the number of patients that crews can see in an 11 hour shift,” said Mr Harper.

“Patients can now take up to four or four-and-a-half hours.

“This means that when we put additional resources on, we’re not seeing the productivity we would have hoped to see.”

SWASFT, NHS Devon and University Hospitals Plymouth insist measures are being put in place to improve the service and councillors agreed to monitor progress in future meetings.