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Meeting our targets

Call prioritisation

Our 999 calls are prioritised into one of four categories:

  • Category one: for life-threatening injuries and illnesses, specifically cardiac arrest.
  • Category two: for emergency calls, such as stroke patients.
  • Category three: for urgent calls such as abdominal pains, and which will include patients to be treated in their own home.
  • Category four: less urgent calls such as diarrhoea and vomiting and back pain.

You can find out more about ambulance response categories here.

This year’s targets

From November 2017, the way we categorise emergency calls changed in line with new standards introduced across the country. Our organisations works to achieve targets of:

  • Category one: these will need to be responded to in an average time of seven minutes.
  • Category two: these will need to be responded to in an average time of 18 minutes.
  • Category three: these will be responded to at least nine out of 10 times within 120 minutes.
  • Category four: some of these patients will be given advice over the telephone or referred to another service such as a GP or pharmacist. These less urgent calls will be responded to at least nine out of 10 times within 180 minutes.

To find out more about how we have been performing against our targets, see information on the NHS England website.

We also report on our performance against the national set of 11 new clinical quality indicators.

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