From April 2011, all ambulance services in
England are 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.
Full details can be found on the
Department of Health website, while information about how
each service is performing is also now available in a clinical
dashboard.
- 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
specialist 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.
In addition to these, all ambulance services are also
continuing to be monitored against the standard of an ambulance
reaching 95 per cent of Category A calls within 19
minutes.