Ambulance head dismisses SMPs' criticism as 'unfair'

Adrian Lucas, chief executive of the Scottish Ambulance Service and Geoff Scaife, chief executive of the NHS in Scotland, were attacked for their failures to learn from developments in the English ambulance service.

A report by the committee slammed the SAS's failure to meet response targets. Launching it, convenor Andrew Welsh MSP said Mr Lucas and Mr Scaife appeared 'largely ignorant of the results' of priority despatch schemes in England.

Mr Welsh said: 'At every turn in our inquiry, we were met by a fundamental lack of data from the Scottish Ambulance Service.'

But Mr Lucas suggested the problem lay in a lack of any clear evidence on the efficacy of priority despatch. He told HSJ : 'Are there any results of English schemes? There aren't any.'

Describing the criticism as 'a bit unfair', Mr Lucas said: 'No one's aware of the absolute benefits of prioritisation - we can point to improvements in performance, but in some instances it has come about through additional resources.'

Mr Welsh attacked the ambulance service for 'failing to achieve its own 999 response time targets across Scotland'.

'We still do not know what impact these target failures have had, ' he said.

But there was 'anecdotal evidence that people have died'.

But Mr Lucas said that an earlier report by the National Audit Office - on which the committee's work was based - had shown that 'overall' the Scottish service 'compared favourably to most of the English ambulance services', while some regions did better.

The service had received£100,000 funding to evaluate priority despatch and would submit a business case for implementing priority despatch to Scottish health minister Susan Deacon in January, he said.

Mr Scaife, also attacked by the audit committee, was not available for comment. But an NHS Management Executive spokesperson said it was 'considering its response' to the report.