UK health secretary heckled live on camera by furious woman
UK Health Secretary Steve Barclay was heckled by a furious woman who accused the Conservative government of doing 'nothing' about ambulance waiting times.
Barclay was speaking to the press outside Moorfields Eye Hospital in London when a woman interrupted his interview and heckled him.
She said: "Are you gonna do anything about the ambulances waiting and the people dying out?
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"Don't you think 12 years is long enough? 12 years, you've done b****r all about it, people have died and all you've done is nothing."
While he tried to reassure her that 'of course' he and the government were doing something about long waiting times for ambulances and the medical peril that often resulted, that did not satisfy her at all.
Once she had gone he insisted bringing down ambulance waiting times was an 'absolute priority' for the government.
He said: "We’re looking at conveyance rates in ambulances, we’re looking at how we address variation in performance, we’re looking at funding.
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"An extra £150 million to the ambulance service, a further £50 million into call centres, for 111 and 999, in terms of call handling, a further £30 million into St John Ambulance around the auxiliary ambulance performance."
"We’re also then looking at what happens with the ambulance handovers, so emergency departments, how we triage those, how we look at the allocation of this within the system."
Barclay being heckled comes after a report from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) showed many patients faced 'frequent and prolonged' waits for an ambulance to arrive.
Several tragic cases were featured in the report, including the situation of one elderly person who died while waiting for an ambulance to arrive, and another who spent 14 hours lying on the floor before help came.
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Ambulances have their own targets when it comes to waiting times, with speed of arrival depending on the severity of the medical emergency.
For serious problems, such as life-threatening conditions like a heart attack, the average response time should be under seven minutes, while 90 percent of ambulances ought to be on the scene within 15 minutes.
According to NHS figures, ambulances are missing that target as their current average response time is eight minutes and 36 seconds.
Other categories make for grim reading with waiting times, as category two cases including strokes and chest pains are meant to have an average response time of under 18 minutes, but the latest figures show people were waiting on average 39 minutes and 58 seconds.
Category three, covering urgent problems, has targets of 90 percent of ambulances arriving within two hours, instead the average ambulance will take two hours and nine minutes to get there.
Joe Harker