Ambulance Quality Indicators (AQIs)
Ambulance Quality Indicators (AQIs) were introduced in April 2011 for all ambulance services in England. They are used to understand the quality of care provided, focussing particularly on the outcome of care provided for patients, as well as the speed of response to patients.
Ambulance service providers use AQIs to stimulate continuous improvements in the care they provide for patients. AQIs were created to provide a comprehensive and balanced view of care. AQIs should be used as a total set rather than focussing only on a few specific AQIs. As a complete set, AQIs provide a much fuller picture of how ambulance services are performing.
AQIs are designed to be consistent with measures in other parts of the NHS, most notably those in hospital emergency departments.
It is widely recognised that the first year of AQI data collection is a transitional year from the previous reporting measures to ensure all ambulance services have consistent definitions and reporting methods. For this reason it is not yet possible to directly compare AQI performance across ambulance trusts; however, AQIs produced by individual ambulance trusts can be used to monitor changes and improvements in performance for those individual ambulance trusts. |
View our Trust's performance against key performance indicators:
Category A performance
Category B performance
Category C performance
Urgent Calls performance
Complaints performance
PALS performance |
South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWAST) is committed to using AQIs to support continuous improvement in the quality of care we provide to our patients; and to help patients to understand how we are performing.
Ambulance response times, that is how quickly we respond to patients and reach them to provide care and support, remain important for the most seriously ill patients and performance against the response time targets continue to be monitored against well established national targets. We are required to respond to 75% of life-threatening calls within 8 minutes and 95% of calls within 19 minutes if requested by a clinician attending to a patient.
National AQI Dashboard
Each month SWAST will publish the latest data on performance in the form of a ‘dashboard’. This will show how we are performing in each AQI area compared to how we in previous months. As time goes on these dashboards will help compare our performance to other ambulance services across England.
How to use the AQI dashboard
To open the AQI dashboard, please click on the link below.
AQI Dashboard
The document will open as a microsoft Excel spreadsheet – please click ‘Enable Macros’ when prompted at the top of the screen to enable you to see all of the information.
A map of the UK will then be shown; simply click on the South West area to look at our latest data.
Please click here to access an explanation document which provides further information on each indicator.
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