‘Ambulance can be sent at once in most serious cases’

JESCC team leader Adam Cartwright said that the team aims to have an ambulance sent within a minimum of 90 seconds, but

sometimes it can be much faster when a 'category one' call is received.

Centre manager Karl Zierlinger said the newly-introduced triage system for ambulances will not delay arrivals at the most serious cases.

With pressure on the St John Emergency Ambulance Service increasing in recent years – calls have risen by nearly 50% compared with six years ago – it is now prioritising casualties.

The receiving point for all 999 calls is JESCC’s headquarters and Mr Zierlinger explained that when a call is received a couple of questions can establish quickly whether an ambulance needs to be sent immediately.

People’s perceptions that ambulances were not despatched rapidly were wrong, he said.

While there is a pre-set series of questions that the call-takers have to ask, they can get the important information quickly, said Mr Cartwright.

He was one of the first staff at the control centre when it was established and said the system for handling calls had been updated and refined over the years.

‘Now there is a tried and tested clinically-focused system. Depending on the answers a person gives, it picks out the most important calls.’

Another factor affecting the speed of an ambulance’s arrival is that often they are not being sent from the Rohais, said St John’s head of operations, Dean De La Mare. ‘They could be coming from anywhere.

‘If an ambulance is at a job and a more serious job comes in, JESCC will divert it on.

‘Most of the time now it’s not unusual for us to have three ambulances on the road at once, all with a paramedic on board.’

He wanted to reassure people that they would get the appropriate response to calls based on the system, which is used all over the world.

The new procedure will simply mean that cases that are non-life threatening might have to wait a bit longer for the ambulance, but he said that in nine out of 10 cases they would still arrive within eight minutes.

Calls to JESCC have increased too, with Mr Cartwright saying that they can get about 100 a day, including calls to the main police switchboard. About 18 of which will be for the ambulance.

But at the start of the pandemic, and before a separate hotline dealing with medical Covid calls was set up, the centre took more than 300 in one day.

Staffing at JESCC has been stable over the past couple of years, but there are currently six vacancies on the team.

Applications are open until 24 April.