XN000022-1996-05-29 — Page 36

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Reply:

Mr President,

(a)

(b)

The Administration shares Honourable Members' concerns that our emergency ambulance service should continue to operate to the best standard practicable. To this end, we engaged a consultant last year to review the delivery of the emergency ambulance service. The Consultant concluded that it is more realistic to first take action to ensure that the emergency ambulance service can reliably meet the performance target of answering 95% of all emergency calls within a ten minute travel time, before we consider switching to a response time target. We have accepted the consultant's recommendations. We are, therefore, concentrating our efforts on finding ways to achieve and, if possible, to improve on our existing performance target of responding to 92.5% of emergency calls within the 10-minute travel time target. At the same time, the Director of Fire Services has agreed to begin to establish the necessary data as a first step to determining an appropriate response time target which might be adopted for the future. It would, however, be premature to give any estimate as to the additional resources that may be required to meet a response time target before such a target is established.

The allocation of additional resources to the emergency ambulance service will have to be dealt with within the budgetary planning cycle for 1997/98, and will thus be decided later in the year. We cannot, at this stage, confirm what resources might be allocated to the emergency ambulance service. However, I can assure Honourable Members that I would accord a high priority within my programme areas to improving the emergency ambulance service.

End