Welsh Government invest extra £3m to recruit more staff in bid to improve ambulance response times

A further £3m is to be invested by the Welsh Government to recruit more emergency ambulance staff to improve response times for the most seriously ill or injured.

This additional funding will enable the Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust (WAST) to recruit around 100 additional frontline staff and introduce a new ‘Cymru High Acuity Response Unit’ (CHARU) service.

The CHARU service will seek to improve outcomes for people who have suffered cardiac arrest.

The latest figures for May this year suggest that the ambulance service in Wales was reaching 54.5% of emergency calls within eight minutes. The target is to reach 65% in eight minutes. In rural Powys, the worst-performing area, only 43.5% were arriving within the target.

Health Minister Eluned Morgan said: “We are providing this additional funding as we recognise the immense pressures the ambulance service is under to respond to the most seriously ill and injured people.

“By increasing staff capacity in the short term we can improve response times and ensure better care for people who have been waiting too long for an ambulance.

“Our Six Goals for Urgent and Emergency Care programme will support an increase in staffing in crucial areas in the medium term and help staff to deliver the right care, in the right place, first time whenever possible.”

‘Extreme pressure’

The Welsh Government said that more staff would help to manage increased demand for emergency care and partially mitigate some of the “complex wider system challenges” which continue to place intense pressure on emergency care staff and services.

“These pressures are being intensified by a range of local and national factors including challenges with patient flow through the hospital system, as well as staffing constraints,” they said.

The additional emergency ambulance staff will be deployed “in a targeted way” across Wales in the areas which are under greatest pressure and where there is the greater clinical need, the Welsh Government said.

Jason Killens, Chief Executive of the Welsh Ambulance Service, said: “Extreme pressure remains across the urgent and emergency care system, and we continue to work with partners to find solutions to the complex and long-standing issues.

“In the meantime, we’re growing our workforce to put us in the best possible position to meet rising demand and have already recruited to more than 260 frontline posts in the last two years.

“An additional 100 frontline posts is going to bolster our capacity even further, and we’re grateful to Welsh Government for funding this and the pioneering new CHARU initiative, which we hope will improve the outcomes for our most critically ill patients.”