From April 2011, all ambulance services in England will be measuring and reporting against the below 11 clinical quality indicators, allowing our data to be compared with that of the other services across the country.

The 11 new national indicators, which came into effect this month, are intended to help better assess how South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SECAmb) and other ambulance services perform. These replace the previous Category B response time targets for non-life threatening emergencies.

The indicators include survival rates for people who collapse and stop breathing and the recovery rate of patients suffering heart attacks or strokes.

Response times still play an important part of the new indicators and the current target of responding to at least 75 per cent of Category A life-threatening patients within 8 minutes remains.

While responding to 999 calls quickly remains extremely important to SECAmb, the Trust welcomes the greater focus on clinical outcomes. It has been calling for a long time that outcomes should be the driving factor for measuring success.

The Department of Health also publish this information on their website every month where they give an overview of how ambulance services across the country are performing. Link to Department of Health information.

Clinical Quality Indicators

Outcome from acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI)
STEMI is an acronym meaning 'ST segment elevation myocardial infarction', which is a type of heart attack

• 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 called thrombolysis.
  
• Proportion of calls closed with telephone advice or managed without transport to A&E (where clinically appropriate)
  This indicator should reflect how the whole urgent care system is working, rather than simply the ambulance service or A&E, as it will reflect the availability of alternative urgent care destinations (for example, walk-in centres) and providing treatment to patients in their home.
  
• 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 A 8 minute 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.

Below you will find a link to the latest national performance figures in the form of a dashboard - showing how South East Coast Ambulance Service is doing in each area compared to all other ambulance services in the country.  Please note that due to the complexity of drawing the clinical data together, it will be three months in arrears from the non-clinical data.

The document will open as an Excel spreadsheet - click 'Enable Macros' when prompted. A map of the UK will then be shown - simply click on the South East Coast area to take a look at our latest results. (If you get an error message when opening it regarding Trusted Sources, please click 'yes')

Link to national performance figures dashboard