Nearly 10% of ambulances attending life-threatening calls at the end of last year did not have paramedics on board, new data has revealed.
Some 416 responses to Priority 1 ambulance calls in Huddersfield and surrounding areas were from teams without trained paramedics between October and December, counting for one in 11, or 9.4%, of all urgent responses.
Priority 1 calls refer to patients suffering a suspected cardiac arrest which should be responded to within eight minutes.
Non-paramedic teams will be made up of emergency care assistants who can provide basic to intermediate level emergency healthcare.
Further to this there were also 2,245 AmberT calls for potentially serious conditions in the last quarter of the year where there was no paramedic – counting for 20.2% of all such callouts.
These calls are for people who require an emergency response from a suitably-qualified clinician who can assess and treat them, for example if somebody is having a fit or who is unconscious but breathing normally.
Dr Steven Dykes, deputy medical director at Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust, said: “We are committed to providing high quality care to all our patients and have robust dispatch protocols in place to ensure we respond appropriately to medical emergencies.
“In high-priority, time-critical incidents we dispatch the nearest available ambulance resource to the scene, where paramedics or emergency medical technicians can provide immediate life-saving care to patients.”
