Over 850 seriously ill or injured patients had to wait at least an hour for ambulance

Response times for another 20 ‘Red’ calls – life-threatening illnesses other than cardiac and respiratory arrest – ranged between two to three hours

By: irishmirror.ie

Jun 16 2024
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Over 850 seriously ill or inju

More than 850 seriously ill or injured patients had to wait at least an hour for an ambulance, with one high-priority call not dealt with for more than three hours and 15 minutes during the second half of last year.

Figures from the National Ambulance Service (NAS) show that Cork and Wexford were the counties worst affected by prolonged delays in providing urgent emergency services between July and December 2023.

Figures show that an ambulance did not arrive at a total of 732 calls for a period of between 60 and 90 minutes. There were a further 110 emergency calls that took between 90 and 120 minutes to respond to, data released under Freedom of Information revealed.

Response times for another 20 ‘Red’ calls – life-threatening illnesses other than cardiac and respiratory arrest – ranged between two to three hours.

There were two ‘Red’ calls, one in Carlow and one in Wexford, where an ambulance did not arrive at the location of a call for over 180 minutes. The response time for the emergency in County Carlow logged at three hours 15 minutes and five seconds.

National Ambulance Service said some of the longer-wait calls may have started out as a lower priority but were later reprioritised depending on the circumstances. Of the 864 calls that were not responded to within an hour, nearly 14 per cent – 118 calls – were in Cork, the county worst affected.

Ambulances outside University Hospital Limerick

The county next most impacted was Wexford where it took at least an hour to deal with 96 separate emergency calls made about sick or injured patients. Other counties with relatively high numbers of one-hour-plus delays were Donegal at 61, Mayo at 46, Tipperary at 58, and Waterford at 49, all of which are geographically sizable.

Counties with an extremely low level of lengthy delays included Longford with just five cases, Sligo with four, and Westmeath where there were just seven calls that went over sixty minutes in response time. In the main urban centres, there were 37 calls in Limerick not responded to within an hour, 23 in Galway, and 16 in Dublin.

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