Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:12 pm on 6 December 2016.
I welcome that news, and it is extremely positive. It’s vitally important to my constituents because the response time for those that are life-threatening issues makes, clearly, a major difference to their lives, but also to their families as well, knowing that they have that reassurance that an ambulance, on a red call, will be there in due time.
It’s noticeable, however, that we still have this ongoing problem in England, Wales and Northern Ireland with the wastage of time of ambulances at A&E units. It’s not unique to Wales and it’s been long and enduring. I think the same freedom of information request suggested that over 500,000 hours within the UK were actually wasted. Of course, these are ambulances that could be out doing the good work that they need to do very efficiently. I wonder what you can say in terms of how we address this issue, not only now as the winter pressures also come on top of us, but in years to come as well. There are tremendous inroads that we’ve done into the red-call response time, but how do we actually deal with those wasted hours that are sitting there outside A&E? It’s not just a Wales issue. How do we do this right across all the different nations as well?