By Lucy Ashton
Scottish Labour has slammed the SNP’s failure to support ambulance services, as new data reveals long waits for high risk patients.
A shocking new freedom of information request has shown that the crisis in ambulance services has continued into 2023, with people facing huge waits even in potentially life-threatening cases.
The Scottish Ambulance Service marks their most serious calls as purple or red, both of which indicate there is a chance the patient is having a cardiac arrest or will require resuscitation.
However, figures obtained by Scottish Labour have shown that code red calls can take hours to get a response – including one patient left waiting more than 6 hours and 40 minutes.
One patient whose call was marked as purple, which is used to identify “the most critically ill patients”, had to wait almost an hour and a half for an ambulance.
The target response time for purple and red calls is eight minutes.
Scottish Labour Health spokesperson Jackie Baillie said: “It is scandalous that even patients fighting for their lives can’t count on getting an ambulance quickly.
Labour’s Jackie Baillie, First Minister Humza Yousaf and Health Secretary Michael Matheson.
“Paramedics are doing their best to keep patients safe, but they too are being badly failed by this disastrous SNP government.
“We had plenty of empty promises from Humza Yousaf when he was Health Secretary, but this crisis is still endangering lives.
“Michael Matheson must act where his predecessor failed and support our ambulance service before any more lives are put at risk by this chaos.”