Ambulance Trusts look to quality as response targets are revised

The response time target for Category B calls is to be scrapped but the government is leaving the target for achieving 75% of life threatening calls responded to within 8 minutes.

New indicators will be used to look at the patient pathway and the contribution of the emergency services to patient outcomes. This has prompted many ambulance trusts to look beyond the annual patient satisfaction surveys they may have done to making the measurement of patients experience and outcomes an integral part of service delivery. Using as system such as the COM-Q service from CoMetrica allows patient experience and outcomes measures to be connected to patient data and allow the longer-term outcome of patients to be measured. This has been an unknown for emergency services who rarely find out the ultimate outcome of patients they deliver to A&E.

The move towards clinical pathway based indicators for time-sensitive diagnosis and treatment such as stroke and cardiac re-vascularisation has been welcomed by doctors.