4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less, your ever faithful guide to the numbers all around |
0:09.7 | us in the news and in life. This week is the word data, singular or plural. In future |
0:15.6 | I'll be using the word datums to avoid arguments. Economics is dominated by men today. Have |
0:21.6 | we forgotten the women who shaped the professions early years? The OHS has been caught using |
0:27.2 | spreadsheets with predictably disastrous consequences. And what do we learn from comparing |
0:32.5 | the pay of nurses in the UK to elsewhere in Europe? But first, last month we looked at ambulance |
0:43.1 | response times in England during December 2022. Almost everywhere you looked there were records |
0:49.7 | being broken and not in a good way. We now have the data for January and as you may have heard |
0:55.6 | on the news, the picture is very different. Back in December, the mean average time it took |
1:00.8 | ambulance call handlers to pick up the phone was 88 seconds nearly a minute and a half. In January, |
1:09.2 | this came down to 9 seconds. The median average, a better measure of typical performance, |
1:14.8 | dropped from 37 seconds to just 1 second. So for the majority of callers, there's no weight |
1:21.2 | until the phone is picked up. Looking at how long it takes for an ambulance to arrive at the scene, |
1:26.7 | for the most serious incidents, category one, those where a patient has often stopped breathing |
1:31.7 | and needs for cessation. The mean average time was down from 11 minutes in December to 8 and a |
1:38.8 | half minutes in January. For category two incidents, which include suspected heart attacks and |
1:44.7 | strokes, the mean average time dropped from over an hour and a half down to 32 minutes. |
1:51.9 | These all sound like big improvements and they are, but they're improvements in comparison to |
1:57.6 | December, the worst ever month on record. What happens when we measure them against the NHS's |
2:04.1 | own targets? For category one incidents, the January mean average of eight and a half minutes |
2:10.3 | misses the target, which is seven minutes. For category two incidents, still serious remember, |
2:16.8 | the mean average weight of 32 minutes is still far from the target of 18 minutes. Suddenly, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.