London: Ambulances will be allowed to take longer to reach seriously ill patients under controversial plans announced by the Health Secretary.

Jeremy Hunt on Friday unveiled a pilot scheme that will give operators an extra two minutes to assess 999 calls before dispatching paramedics.

He said the added time will enable staff to establish if an ambulance is really needed, over concerns they are being sent out too readily to patients who are not seriously ill.

But unions warned that the move would cost lives and dismissed the scheme as a ploy to meet targets ahead of the election.

The ambulance service is under severe pressure and for the past nine months has persistently missed the target of responding to life-threatening calls within eight minutes.

This week, operators at East of England and Yorkshire ambulance trusts were accused of downgrading calls in a ploy to make response times look quicker.

The government had previously denied reports it had been considering extending the waiting times for some serious calls from eight minutes to 19. Hunt dismissed such reports as scaremongering but the new pilots will extend target times — albeit by a lesser amount.

They will cover two of the ten ambulance services in England -London and the South West, who together cover 13 million patients — and begin next month. Ambulances will be despatched immediately only if it is a suspected cardiac arrest or major accident.

For all other calls, including life-threatening cases such as strokes, breathing difficulties and blood clots, operators will get three minutes to assess patients. Currently they get one only minute and figures suggest they are wrongly categorising tens of thousands of non-serious calls as “life-threatening”. It is hoped the two added minutes will help operators better judge the needs of patients.

Outlining the plans in a written statement to the Commons on Friday, Hunt said there was “significant evidence to suggest that giving call handlers extra assessment time to make the right decision for the patient could improve their chances of survival”.

He added: “Giving call handlers very limited extra assessment time would ensure that ambulances are better deployed to where they are most needed and would allow a faster response time for those patients who really need it.”

Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham backed the idea of a pilot scheme but said that, with paramedics and AandE units under such pressure, they are poorly timed. “This is the worst winter for years in England’s A and Es. It is not the time for experiments,” he said. “The government must urgently provide reassurance this can be done without putting patient safety at risk.”

Tony Hughes, of the union GMB, which represents ambulance staff, said: “These pilots will only serve to bring worse outcomes for patients.

“The run-up to the general election is clearly a factor so that the Tories can show that ambulance services are meeting their targets. This is so far from the truth.”

Professor Keith Willett, NHS England’s national director for acute care, said the new arrangements will increase the availability of ambulances. “By acting with slightly less haste on the calls, we believe we can get to more patients with more speed,” he said.

The pilot schemes were announced amid more concern over the NHS in Wales, with new figures showing that more than 15,000 patients were left languishing on trolleys for more than 12 hours last year in A and E units.

Waiting times are the worst on record and even more abysmal than in England. Just 81 per cent of patients were treated within four hours, when the target is 95 per cent. Queues of ambulances seen stacked up outside hospitals in Wales over the past few days suggest that the current crisis is even more severe.

(c) Daily Mail