North East Ambulance Service statement on NHSE/I announces £55m of extra money for ambulance services

Here is the NEAS response to a story issued by NHS England earlier today

Helen Ray, chief executive of North East Ambulance Service, added: “This is a welcome boost to all the staff at NEAS. We’ve been incredibly busy over the last year and continue to have some of the fastest response times to life-threatened patients in the country. However, our responses to some patients who have not had an immediate threat to their life has not been to the standard we would want. This investment will help us to respond quicker to those patients and provide some relief to our staff, who have had a difficult year.”

  • NEAS answered 44,159 emergency 999 calls last month; an increase of 30% (or more than 10,000 extra 999 calls) compared with June 2020 and 9% higher (more than 3,500 extra 999 calls) compared with June 2019.
  • The ambulance service attended more than 2,000 extra emergency incidents across the North East last month compared with the same month in 2019, before the pandemic. Ambulances attended 33,987 emergencies last month compared with 31,821 in June 2019. This is a 7% increase in demand.

NEAS also answered an average of more than 2,000 calls a day to NHS111 last month – a total of 61,378 calls to NHS111 in June alone.