You are here: Home >
About us >
Our performance >
Ambulance Quality Indicators
Ambulance Quality Indicators
- Since April 2011, all ambulance trusts in England have been
measured and reporting against 11 ambulance quality indicators
(AQIs), which allow our performance to be compared with that of
other services across the country. The indicators are split
into ambulance systems and clinical outcomes
- Ambulance system indicators consider the way in which we answer
and manage responses to all emergency calls coming into the Trust,
whilst clinical outcome indicators consider the care that we
deliver to some of the most seriously unwell patients that we
attend. Further details on each indicator can be found below
and on the
NHS England website.
- Whilst response times are still an important part of the AQIs
and the current target of responding to at least Cat 1
emergencies within a mean average time of seven minutes and at
least nine out of 10 times before 15 minutes, the Trust
welcomes the greater focus of clinical outcomes for our
patients
- NHS England collates performance information against the AQIs
for each ambulance trust on a monthly basis. This is
published on a national
dashboard. (Please note that due to the complexity of
drawling the clinical data together, it will be three months in
arrears from the non-clinical data)
Clinical Outcome Indicators
- Outcome from acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction
(STEMI – a type of heart attack)
This indicator
requires ambulance services to ensure delivery of rapid assessment
and treatment for patients experiencing this type of heart attack,
as this is crucial to the cardiac care pathway which aims to
restore coronary blood flow thereby improving patient
outcome
- Outcome from cardiac arrest - return of
spontaneous circulation
This indicator will measure
how many patients who are in cardiac arrest but following
resuscitation have a pulse (heartbeat) on arrival at
hospital
- Outcome from cardiac
arrest - survival to
discharge
Following on from the second indicator,
this one will measure the rate of those who recover from
cardiac arrest and are subsequently discharged from
hospital
- Outcome following stroke for ambulance
patients
This indicator will require ambulance
services to measure the time it takes from the 999 call to the time
it takes those F.A.S.T-positive
stroke patients to arrive at a specailist stroke
centre, so that they can be rapidly assessed for
treatment known as thrombolysis
Ambulance System Indicators
- Re-contact rate following discharge of care (i.e.
closure with telephone advice or following treatment at the
scene)
If patients have to go back and call 999 a second time, it is
usually because they are anxious about receiving an ambulance
response or have not got better as expected. Occasionally it may be
due to an unexpected or a new problem. To ensure that
ambulance trusts are providing safe and effective care the first
time, every time, this indicator will measure how many callers or
patients call us back within 24 hours of the initial call being
made
- Call abandonment rate
This indicator will
ensure that we and other ambulance services are not having problems
with people phoning 999 and not being able to get
through
- Time to answer calls
It equally important
that if people/patients dial 999 that they get call answered
quickly. This indicator will therefore measure how quickly all 999
calls that we receive get answered
- Service experience
All ambulance services
will need to demonstrate how they find out what people think of the
service they offer (including the results of focus groups and
interviews) and how we are acting on that information to
continuously improve patient care.
- Category 1 seven-minute mean response
time
This indicator measures the speed of all
ambulance responses to the scene of potentially
life-threatening incidents and measures that those patients who
are most in need of an emergency ambulance gets one quickly
- Time to treatment by an ambulance-dispatched health
professional
It is important that if patients need an
emergency ambulance response, that the wait from when the 999 call
is made to when an ambulance-trained healthcare professional
arrives is as short as possible, because urgent treatment may be
needed
How to use the AQI
dashboard
Click on the link above to open the dashboard. The
document will open as an Excel spread-sheet (if you get an error
message when opening it regarding Trusted Sources, please click
'yes')– please click 'Enable Content' when prompted at the top of
the screen to enable you to see all the information. A map of
the UK will then be shown – simply click on the South East Coast
area to take a look at our latest data or click on the narrative
tab on the right hand side of the page with the map to see charts
and narrative in regard to our performance. This information will
open as a PDF document outside of the Dashboard document.
