Mr. Martin Dunne:

On the incident in Mayo raised by the Deputy, the command and control centre which takes the call operates a system called advance medical priority dispatch. This allows the call to be triaged to certain different levels, which allows the centre to send the proper clinician in the proper timeframe to that patient. We are trying to develop international best practice command and control centres with the patient at the focus.

Part of this response time is that the treatment starts on the phone. An ECHO call is a cardiac arrest while DELTA is a life-threatening non-cardiac incident. Patients in one of these categories can be treated immediately when they phone in. The operators are trained to tell the caller how to do resuscitation, administer certain levels of medication, including aspirin if available, and operate a defibrillator, even if they might not be trained to use it.

Response times for ECHO and DELTA calls are being measured. Other calls beneath are not. The main response time we are looking at is the transport in the ambulance, namely 18 minutes and 59 seconds. At all times, we will dispatch the closest available resource to the patient. In some cases, that could be a community first responder, a vehicle from the national ambulance service, an off-duty ambulance service member of staff, if one is available, or a transporting vehicle. In some cases, unfortunately, the vehicle that is closest is not as close as it could be. The triage will ensure the closest available vehicle to the clinical presentation of that patient is what is sent.