EMERGENCY ambulance response times across Gwent and the rest of Wales improved during January after the rock-bottom figures recorded the previous month.

But performance against the eight-minute response standard is still a long way short of the target on an all-Wales basis and for individual council areas.

Of the 14,230 category A calls that received an emergency response on scene, less than half (48.5 per cent) arrived inside eight minutes. In Gwent, 2,657 such calls received an emergency response on scene, but even fewer – just 44.3 per cent – achieved the eight-minute standard.

And three of the four worst performing areas in Wales for the ambulance service in terms of eight-minute responses were in Gwent.

Blaenau Gwent had the poorest category A emergency response time figures, at 40.1 per cent, with Torfaen (40.6 per cent) and Caerphilly (41.4 per cent) also among the worst.

Overall in Gwent in January, 1,479 category A calls received an on scene emergency response that took longer than eight minutes to arrive.

The latest figures have been published just two days after an announcement from the Welsh Government that from March, more detailed emergency ambulance response information will start to be published. This will focus on patients classified as having the most life threatening conditions where there is clinical evidence to support an eight-minute response is paramount. These are known as Red 1 calls.

Two years ago the McClelland Review into ambulance services in Wales concluded that there is little clinical evidence to support the eight-minute response time target for the vast majority of 999 calls, which are currently classified as ‘life threatening’.

The eight-minute target was devised more than 40 years ago, and in the aftermath of the review, exploratory work has been done on developing performance measures intended to better reflect the quality of care being delivered by paramedics to patients suffering from stroke, STEMI (a type of heart attack), and fractured hips.

The aim is to provide a more in-depth picture of emergency ambulance service performance for the most life threatening conditions, but it remains to be seen whether they reveal the service is delivering intervention at or beyond target levels for those patients most in need.

And in the meantime, the latest set of figures has provoked another round of condemnation from the Welsh Government’s opposition.

This has been led by Welsh Conservative shadow health minister Darren Millar AM who called January’s figures “appalling” and demanded that the Labour administration “get to grips with these issues.”