AT THE December county council meeting we heard that the ambulance service for Gloucestershire is not meeting its target times for emergency response (red) calls.
Indeed there is not a single ambulance service in England that is doing so.
However I want to highlight that this situation is not only about those emergency calls but also the knock-on effect this is having on lower-priority calls in which people require an ambulance to get to hospital.
My constituents regularly contact me about this problem.
To illustrate, this is a true story about an 83-year-old woman from Leckhampton who happens to be my mother-in-law.
She suffers from multiple medical problems.
Last month her GP made a house call and decided she needed to go to hospital in an ambulance.
The doctor called for an ambulance at 1pm.
Because of heavy demand from higher priority calls, an ambulance finally arrived to take the patient to hospital at 1 in the morning, i.e. 12 hours after the GP’s first call.
At that time of night, because of continuing restrictions at Cheltenham General between 8pm and 8am, she had to be taken to Gloucester for admission there, this subsequently caused problems in visiting for her 89-year-old husband, who suffers from Alzheimer’s.
So, do I blame the ambulance service for the delayed response?
No, the main cause for this situation is the fact this government is starving the NHS of funding.
Between now and 2020, the Conservatives plan that the proportion of our national wealth (GDP) spent on our health service will continue to go down, while demand goes up.
And meanwhile, here in Gloucestershire, the government is also cutting back, year after year, on funding for the County Council’s public health responsibilities - a decision described by Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, as “penny wise and pound foolish”, because better public health keeps people out of expensive hospital beds.
My bottom line is that the current crisis in our health and care system will not be solved without a national cross-party settlement on proper funding.
IAIN DOBIE
Spokesperson on health for the GCC Liberal Democrat group and county councillor for Leckhampton and Warden Hill
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