AMBULANCE crews in the north west have been steadily getting busier in the past five years, the Warrington Guardian can reveal.

A Freedom of Information request to the North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) shows that 1.17 million calls came in 2014-15, compared to 1.24 million in 2018-19 – the last full year data was available.

1.16 million calls were made to NWAS for 2019-20 by the end of February this year.

Emergency calls are broken down from categories 1 to 4 – with C1 being ‘calls for life-threatening illnesses or injuries’, according to NHS England.

Just over 113,000 of such calls were made to the service in 2018-19, with less than 0.05 percent of these incidents seeing crews arrive more than an hour late.

Since the new categorisation system came in three years ago, less than 1 percent of C1 calls were dealt with severely late. That number appears to be dropping as time goes by, with only seven requests (of 112,000 in 2019-20) for ambulance help suffering the same issue – 0.006 percent.

716,000 C2 requests were logged in the same year, with three percent of these emergencies seeing an ambulance arrive an hour past its target time. Five percent of C3 and C4 incidents were similarly late.

The new targets were introduced by NHS England in 2017 following the “largest study of ambulance services in the world.” NWAS began using the C1-C4 system on August 7 that year.

Not every 999 call requires an ambulance to take the patient to an accident and emergency ward,.Treatment is also provided over the phone and by paramedics face-to-face, but without a patient travelling to hospital.

A May 2018 review into the new system described it as the “biggest substantial change in ambulance operating practice in England for 40 years and has required enormous effort from ambulance services to operationalise the required changes.”

Whilst data suggests the scheme has been a success in the north west, there were some teething problems in its initial year, as the review identified.

In the 2017-18 half-year, when the system was first used, NWAS paramedics arrived at 248 life-threatening incidents over an hour past their target time, compared to 48 in 2018-19 and 7 last year.

A spokesperson for North West Ambulance Service said: “The trust works hard to provide the right care for our patients at the right time. We prioritise our emergency calls based on [the] severity of the patient’s condition to help us get to the most seriously ill first.

“A number of factors can affect our response targets including seasonal illnesses, rural locations and the volume of 999 calls that we receive.

“We have invested in a number of measures to further improve our response times including additional ambulances, a review of our rota system and where possible we treat patients in the community to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions and help free up emergency resources to attend patients who need us the most.”