Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 8 October 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

National Ambulance Service: Discussion

2:00 am

Mr. Robert Morton:

It is a combination of all. One of the things we look at everyday internally is a job-cycle time. That is essentially all of the moving parts of a single 999 call together. The average job-cycle time used to be 1.5 hours. It is now bouncing to two hours per incident. That is due to a conglomeration of issues, such as the amount of time crews spend on the scene as they are delivering a higher level of care, new infection prevention and control guidelines, the time it takes to hand over to the emergency department, and in some cases, the journey time. It is an overall aggregate. What we are seeing overall is we need more resources for every call and we are receiving more calls.