Within North West Ambulance Service (NWAS), there are three dispatch suites which are based in Manchester, Preston and Liverpool. Each of the sites has a number of dispatch areas which are split geographically, based mainly on postcodes, for the purposes of dispatching emergency resources.
The geographical areas have not been reviewed for many years and in that time, there have been changes to the landscape of the areas. There have also been hospital and ambulance station closures and relocations. Over the years, there have been increases in the number of emergency ambulances to meet the demand.
Today’s issue is that the dispatch areas do not have parity in terms of how many emergency resources each are controlling and in how many allocations are made by each dispatcher. This has resulted in some dispatch areas being overwhelmed with incidents to allocate which ultimately leads to delays in responding to patients.
The aim of this project is to generate evidence to redraw these boundaries to make it more equitable across the three areas.