London Ambulance performance on life threatening calls falls sharply in run up to Olympics

New figures from the Department of Health show just 71.9 per cent of Category A calls were responded to within eight minutes during April, against a target of 75 per cent.

LAS was the only English ambulance trust not to meet the target of responding to calls in response to potentially life threatening situations during the month.

At the end of March the service finally introduced its new call handling system CommandPoint. This came nine months after the first switchover attempt failed leaving control room staff relying on pen and paper for about 15 hours and just 2 per cent of category A patients receiving a response within eight minutes.

An independent report criticised LAS for failing to prepare adequately for the switchover and as a result the trust ran a series of “go-live” tests during February and March.

A spokesman said a drop in performance of around five per cent had been predicted during the first six weeks of the new system, the introduction of which also coincided with an unexplained increase in Category A demand.

Figures from the DH show the number of calls requiring a category A response within London increased by 18 per cent in April 2012 , up from 30,258 during April 2011.

The spokesman said: “We never anticipated achieving 75 per cent in April and had prior agreement from our commissioners that we would not expect to reach this figure.

“The new system is now familiar to all control room staff and demand has returned to more or less predicted levels, with a corresponding increase in performance.”

The trust met the category A target for the ninth year in a row during 2011-12. It also increased the proportion of calls managed without transporting the patient to accident and emergency from 26.3 per cent in April 2011 to 30.4 per cent in April 2012.