AFTER 10 years of campaigns, the leader of Cotswold District Council has urged ambulance bosses to take action to improve response times.

Ever since a 23-year-old student died in a car crash near Cirencester after waiting 45 minutes for an ambulance after a car crash in 2007, there has been pressure from CDC and its leader Cllr Lynden Stowe, Cotswold MP Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Gloucestershire County Council to improve the service.

Despite these calls for action, the service providers – initially the Great Western Ambulance Service, which was then succeeded by South West Ambulance NHS Foundation Trust (SWAST) – have struggled to respond to the highest priority emergency calls within the eight-minute target time.

Figures for April 1 to September 30, 2015 for the Cotswolds showed that – against a target of 75 per cent success – SWAST only achieved these priority eight-minute response times for 46 per cent of Red 1 and 50 per cent of Red 2 incidents, compared with ratings of 65 per cent and 63 per cent for the county as a whole.

Concerns deepened further when, in September 2015, the eight-minute response target was only achieved 38 per cent of the time in the Cotswolds, with the figure dropping to 25 per cent in the north of the district.

“I have always maintained that the ambulance service’s frontline workers are dedicated professionals and respond to emergencies to the best of their abilities,” said Cllr Stowe, who has recently undertaken a review of performances following the 2007 incident.

“However, I have expressed grave reservations about their senior management over the years and I am still not convinced that they are making sufficient progress.

“Both I and my fellow councillors at CDC are still aware of too many incidents where those in need of an ambulance continue to wait for very long periods.

“In one case towards the end of last year, a 95-year-old woman waited four hours following a serious fall, and we know of many similarly serious instances where the response was measured in hours rather than minutes. This is clearly unacceptable, and we will continue to press for better ambulance response times.”

SWAST will present a report to GCC’s health care overview and scrutiny committee in March, detailing the progress on ambulance response times.

This includes the success of an extended triage system to cut back on the need for trips to hospital, and changes to the vehicle fleet which should result in two ambulances being based at Moreton-in-Marsh in the near future.

Cllr Joe Harris, leader of Cotswold Liberal Democrats, agreed that the ambulance response times are “unacceptable” but called on CDC to lobby the government rather than “blaming the management of the ambulance trust”.

He said: “Our local NHS is being chronically underfunded by the Conservative government and the ambulance service is suffering.

"Cllr Stowe needs to start with ensuring CDC are lobbying his Conservative colleagues in government to secure an urgent solution to this ongoing problem, not blaming the management of the ambulance trust.”

In response, Cllr Stowe said: “Like a lot of people I want to see the NHS run much more efficiently. Like many other socialist politicians, Cllr Harris just wants to throw money at it – in which case he has got to come clean and tell us which taxes he wants to increase.”

A SWAST spokesman said: “In the face of rising public demand and expectations, a finite resource and the challenges of investment in the ambulance service, the trust is taking part in the national NHS ambulance response programme which aims to improve response times to critically ill patients and make sure the most appropriate response is provided for each patient first time.

"The national requirement is to attend 75 per cent of our highest priority (category 1) calls within eight minutes and for November, 2016 the response time for category 1 calls across Gloucestershire stands at 74.81 per cent.”