Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am not sure if the figures are calculated or available, but I will look into the matter. I am not sure if the Deputy has had a chance to read the report from cover to cover, but, for anyone who has, it is abundantly clear that an overemphasis on crude response times is not a good idea. In other parts of the world overemphasis on response times has caused ambulance services to pull out of rural areas because the times set were not achievable. This effectively handed services over to helicopters, which is not the right or the best thing to do. We must be careful, therefore, about how we address the issue of response times. The Deputy knows rural Ireland well and that a call time of less than eight minutes would be very difficult to achieve in many parts of the country, short of having an ambulance in every parish or firm. We want to move towards a clinical audit to actually find out what happens to patients. Where someone is not reached by an ambulance in eight minutes and 30 seconds, he or she may be defibrillated, intubated and recover in hospital. That is considered to be a failure, yet someone could be reached within three or four minutes and die in the ambulance, but it is considered a success, which is absurd. That is why we must move towards having a proper clinical audit to find out exactly what happens to patients from the time they call a ambulance to the time they reach the hospital. I am glad that we are moving towards a clinical audit for the first time in 2015. The Dublin Fire Service does some of this work already.

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