The Department of Health have current targets for ambulance response time for category A calls – with 75% of responses to be made within 8 minutes. A category A call is defined as an immediately life threatening emergency. Despite providing an invaluable service, the Ambulance Service sometimes fails to meet these target times.

From models produced in the 1980’s we have been aware that a reduction in time for ‘early access’ and ‘early defibrillation’ by increasing the number of emergency vehicles (within existing response services) is not feasible beyond a certain threshold.

One possible solution is a First Responder Scheme.