20 News THERE was widespread
expectation that the publication of the latest ambulance waiting times for Wales would reveal a disastrous slump in performance. That expectation has been met
in spades.
There is a 65% target for ambulances to reach the most serious cases within eight minutes. The
most recent figures reveal
that what the Welsh Ambulance Service Trust (WAST) says is ‘an unacceptable level of service delivery’ meant that only 42.6% achieved the target time. Pembrokeshire’s figures at 52.2%, while better than the Welsh average, are still markedly below the performance target. Shadow Health Minister Elin Jones of Plaid Cymru said: “After recent reports of ambulances queuing outside A&E departments we suspected that today’s ambulance response times would be bad, but I am stunned by how bad they are. In June 2014 the Health Minister told us that he would implement urgent improvements to the service by September last year, but that hasn’t happened. The Welsh Government has failed to manage the service to meet the demand placed upon
it. Peaks in demand happen during the
winter months happen every
year, and the Labour Government should be prepared for this. Instead, paramedics and A&E staff have to take pressure off other parts of the NHS. It is not their fault.”
She concluded: “The capacity of social care and community hospitals has been cut, which has put A&E services under unbearable pressure. The Minister should be focusing on resurrecting social and community care in order to ease the unbearable pressure on A&E and paramedics.” Citing
unprecedented call
numbers, Tracy Myhill, Interim Chief Executive of WAST claimed: “When you break down our ‘Red’ calls into Red 1’s (immediately life-threatening, e.g. cardiac arrest) and Red 2’s (serious but less immediately time critical, e.g. suspected stroke), we performed much better on the higher acuity Red 1 calls (57.9%) than the Red 2 calls (40.6%). While this is still not where we’d like performance to be, it demonstrates that we are still reaching the majority of our most critically ill patients within eight minutes. The pressure across the unscheduled care system in December was immense.”
Health board blinks aſter Pembroke Dock debacle AFTER stormy scenes at
the previous week’s public meeting in Pembroke Dock, the Board changed its approach at Letterston on Tuesday (Jan 27). David Williams
of
Pembrokeshire Health Concern told The Herald: “It was a pleasant surprise to see Hywel Dda had taken into account public feelings at last meeting in Pembroke Dock with no presentation screens in sight and chairs arranged in circle with open centre. After around 10-15 minutes of introduction by Hywel
Dda the meeting went straight into questions & discussions so thank you Hywel Dda for at least taking notice of public on this. There was a different atmosphere with public being controlled and polite and less of a sense of being talked down to even if they did not agree with a lot of answers.”
While the questions were much the same as at Pembroke Dock, the Board representatives were noticeably less combative than at the previous meeting. David Williams
said: “The
Board referred to training issues and said they had to put quality & safety first. However, it was pointed out that Withybush had an excellent quality and safety record when reconfiguration first proposed – both being in top 40 hospitals in UK and higher-rated than Glangwili.
That position
changed only when the Board embarked on reconfiguration. At the meeting, a point was made that you could have the highest quality & safety in country but that was of no use if that quality and safety
were not accessible in time.” Expressing
disappointment
at the fact so few councillors had shown an interest in the events, David singled out Wiston representative David Howlett, who attended and asked a question. Sue Kenny presented Hywel
Dda and the CHC with typed copies of
patients’ experiences taken
from the Save Essential Services and SWAT Facebook pages. Both bodies representatives promised to read them and take them into account.
Striking a puzzled note, David said: “In a conversation after the meeting with Paul Hawkins (Board Operations Director) I mentioned that Withybush looked deserted last Saturday. In reply, he said: ‘I’ve not been there so you would know better than me’. I hope he meant he had not been there on a Saturday as he said when appointed he was going to visit every hospital in area; but that was not impression I had.”
Minister welcomes progress in closing attainment gap NEW figures out today show the
Welsh Government is making good progress in closing the attainment gap between those pupils eligible for free school meals and those not. Education Minister, Huw Lewis has thanked Regional Consortia, local authorities and schools for their ongoing efforts to break the link between poverty and educational attainment but has said there is still more work to be done. The latest
statistics show pupils eligible for Free School Meals are performing at historically high
levels and that there was an overall 2 percentage point rise in their performance between 2013 and 2014. The more detailed figures show the gap in attainment between pupils eligible for free school meals and their counterpart has reduced at Foundation Phase level, Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3.
Indeed at Foundation Phase level
the Welsh Government has already met and exceeded its target to reduce the attainment gap by 10% against
2012 levels by 2017, and had secured a 11.6% reduction by the end of 2014. Welcoming the figures, Education
Minister Huw Lewis said: “These statistics show that we are starting to
see the real educational to progress in
link between deprivation attainment,
thank Regional particularly
at the Foundation Phase level. I am very encouraged by this and would like
Consortia,
local authorities and schools across Wales
for their ongoing hard work. Despite this progress, there is no doubt
breaking and
that we still have a long way to go. I am continuing to introduce policies aimed at ensuring that children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds do as well as their peers. Indeed we will soon be publishing the results of our new Categorisation system which has been designed specifically to ensure that schools can only achieve the highest green category if a percentage of their pupils eligible
for free school meals are
performing at the highest levels. It is this sort of approach that will ensure
that all learners in Wales, whatever their background and given
every
opportunity to succeed.” Last year the Education Minister launched ‘ Rewriting the Future’: Raising ambition and attainment in Welsh Welsh
schools’ which sets out the
to tackling the impact of poverty on educational
Government’s commitment attainment and what it
expects Regional Consortia, local authorities and schools to do to support learners from more deprived backgrounds.
THE PEMBROKESHIRE HERALD FRIDAY JANUARY 30 2015
Follow us on Twitter @pembsherald
Ambulance service ‘unacceptable’
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