A new national framework for ambulance responses to requests from health care professionals (HCPs) has recently been published. Urgent care leaders within the NHS have been working on this for 18 months, so we were concerned that the final draft was shared with us only in June. However, we have engaged to revise the obviously unworkable elements of the proposals and we now have a framework that sets clear standards for response times. An area of significant concern was the requirement to provide a National Early Warning Score (NEWS2) in all situations. We raised the point that NEWS2 scoring has not been fully validated for assessing response priority in the community. However, recognising that the project group saw this as the best available measure of risk, and was disinclined to change, we agreed that NEWS2 scoring should be provided only where available, especially given that GPs visiting patients at home will often not have access to pulse oximetry. We also agreed that the original requirement that the requesting HCP must make the phone call should be revised to encouragement that the HCP should make the call. This was for reasons obvious to people working in practices with small teams where the imperative is often to deliver life-saving patient care whilst asking supporting staff to make the emergency call.
Notwithstanding these adjustments this framework is welcomed as a national set of standards against which GPs and their staff can expect delivery in situations of stress and need.