Ambulance response times (AmbSYS)
Published by NHS England · Official source
Update schedule
- Monthly.
Level of detail
- Ambulance trust (regional ambulance service), plus an England national total
What we show
- Category 1 (life-threatening, e.g. cardiac arrest) mean and 90th-centile response time
- Category 2 (emergency, e.g. stroke, chest pain) mean and 90th-centile response time
- Category 3 (urgent) mean and 90th-centile response time
- Category 4 (less urgent) mean and 90th-centile response time
- Total 999 contacts (call volume) for context
Caveats
- This is an ambulance-SERVICE dataset, not a hospital dataset — England's ~11 ambulance trusts each cover a large multi-hospital region, so these figures are shown on a standalone page and are never attached to a single hospital or trust page.
- Measured completely separately from the hospital A&E 4-hour performance figures shown elsewhere on this site. An ambulance responding quickly and a hospital's A&E department admitting/discharging within 4 hours are two different stages of care — never cross-compared.
- The published NHS England ambulance standards are: Category 1 mean 7 minutes / 90th-centile 15 minutes; Category 2 mean 18 minutes / 90th-centile 40 minutes; Category 3 90th-centile 2 hours; Category 4 90th-centile 3 hours. There is no official mean-time standard for Category 3 or 4, so those mean figures are shown as context only, never colour-graded.
- England only — this page does not include Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland ambulance services, which run under different standards and are measured separately.
- All times are whole seconds as published; a blank cell in the source means the figure was not published for that service and month, and is shown as '—', never as zero.
Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information.