PARAMEDICS are not getting to enough emergencies in time across large parts of Oxfordshire.

South Central Ambulance Service has admitted its service in rural areas of the county is unacceptable.

Ambulance crews should reach 75 per cent of high- priority calls within eight minutes – but SCAS’s ‘snapshot’ figure for January was just 52 per cent.

A report to Oxfordshire County Council’s health scrutiny committee said: “We acknowledge that our performance in rural Oxfordshire remains below an acceptable level and much work has been undertaken to understand the complexity of these issues. Rural Oxfordshire represents 29 per cent of all activity in the county.”

The report, by John Nicholas, divisional director for Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, said: “It is important to recognise that ambulances are reaching patients faster than ever before and that response times across Oxfordshire, including rural areas, are improving.

“We are working hard to improve response times across these locations. The greatest challenge for the coming year is to better equalise performance across the whole of Oxfordshire.”

Scrutiny committee chairman Peter Skolar met senior trust representatives to demand improvements.

He said: “We are looking for extra ambulances, extra staff and more money.

“The problem is that outside Oxford’s ring road the service is not able to hit the eight-minute target as required.

“I cannot see how things can get better without a great deal of extra resources from the Oxfordshire Primary Care Trust, and ultimately from the strategic health authority.”

Last year Oxfordshire PCT expressed “a high level of concern” about the state of the ambulance provision in the county, and commissioned a review of the service.

And last spring, West Oxfordshire District Council’s scrutiny committee passed a vote of no confidence in the ambulance service after learning that only 41.2 per cent of emergency call-outs in the district were hitting the eight-minute target.

The South Central service, created in 2006, covers a vast area stretching to the Isle of Wight. Mr Skolar says it is “just too big.”

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