Member's statement: Ambulance Response Times: South Down

Member's statement by Mr Andrew McMurray on 10 February 2026.

MLA

Mr Andrew McMurray

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

10 February 2026

Type

Member's statement

Business

Members' Statements

Heading

Ambulance Response Times: South Down

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5435183

Read the official Assembly record

Text

In the first instance, I pay the utmost respect and give thanks to the Ambulance Service. Its staff are highly trained men and women who answer the call to a ream of incidents across the country, often coming across the most challenging and distressing of incidents. The figures that I will highlight do not reflect on their commitment or their work but rather on the wider systemic issues facing our health service. Too often, those staff spend their time dealing with the challenges of handovers at hospitals, rather than responding to calls in the community. The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service has set a target of responding to category 1 calls within an average of eight minutes and responding to 90% of calls within 15 minutes. Those targets are regularly missed across South Down. In the Mournes district electoral area (DEA), there was no calendar month in which an average response time was recorded that was within the 15-minute target, and, in Slieve Croob, there was only one month in which the average response time was within 15 minutes. The Mournes and Slieve Croob are rural in nature, but, even in Downpatrick DEA, where the county town lies, there were only two months in which response times were within the 15-minute target. For one of those months, the time was 14 minutes and 59 seconds. Crotlieve had seven months in which the average response time was over the 15-minute target. Those were just the average response times to category 1 calls. The maximum response times are extremely worrying. A response time of four hours and 38 minutes was recorded in Slieve Croob.

In the Mournes, there were four months in which response times of over one hour were recorded. One of those was two hours and 34 minutes, and another was three hours and 15 minutes. A category 1 call is defined as dealing with a life-threatening condition, such as cardiac arrest, severe bleeding, unconsciousness, convulsions and fitting. When those are taken into consideration, the waiting times are extremely concerning, not just for the casualty but for those who are generally attending to them. As is so often the case when there is an issue in the statutory sector, the voluntary and community sector steps in. In that regard, I must mention agencies such as Slieve Croob Community First Responders, Mourne Mountain Rescue Team and the RNLI, which very often attends to a casualty if the Ambulance Service cannot. We need to increase the workforce capacity in the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service, finalise the ambulance handover protocol for Northern Ireland, improve measures to ensure better flow of patients through A&E departments and out of our hospitals, and improve capacity in our communities and care system.

454 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:33 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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