Ambulance service leaders are working to ensure patients only go to hospital emergency departments when absolutely necessary, councillors in Southampton have been told.

Members of the city council’s health overview and scrutiny panel heard more ambulances and paramedics were not a solution to demand pressures.

Neil Cook, head of operations for Southampton and the south west at South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS), said the NHS trust wanted to make sure it was performing to the best of its ability.

There had been a reduction in the number of patients seen by the service, but the number of category one – the most serious – incidents had increased in Southampton and the New Forest.

Between April and July, category one incidents were 16.1 per cent higher than expected.

This led to mean response times being between eight and nine minutes, which is above the seven-minute target.

Mr Cook said this category one demand had a knock-on effect on the response to less serious incidents.

Asked what could be done to improve overall performance, he said: “There is no point just getting more ambulances and more paramedics. It just creates a load more churn.

“It is very much about trying to disseminate the work and look at how we can redirect that and who else can help.

“A lot of emergency calls now are social care, mental health patients, that at the moment we are limited to what we can do.

“We are working with Southern Health to have mental health cars, so we are looking at different types of resource we can send to different types of patient rather than just the traditional ambulance, go out, pick them up and take them to hospital.

“We are looking to find different ways of dealing with people.”

Mr Cook said the service had introduced hear and treat, which involves trying to direct people to the best care over the phone, and see and treat, where ambulance staff come out to a patient and treat them without the need to go to hospital.

Discussing what was being done to tackle queuing ambulances at hospitals, Mr Cook said: “We are looking at the demands, looking at where we take the patient and what else we can actually do to divert people away from ED.

“That will ease the pressure on the emergency departments therefore we hopefully don’t have the queues.”

He added: “My role with UHS (University Hospital Southampton) and the system is making sure in this area we absolutely appropriately take patients to ED (emergency department) if they need to be there but we are looking at other avenues into the hospital.”

Mr Cook appeared before the panel on September 5 alongside SCAS transformation programme director Caroline Morris.

The trust was rated as inadequate by the CQC in 2022, with particular concerns regarding the leadership of the organisation and the safety culture.

SCAS subsequently entered the NHS recovery support programme, with an internal improvement programme also taking place.

Ms Morris said the trust was looking at exiting the recovery support programme in September next year.

“We still have recovery to do but we have demonstrated the capability that we no longer need the extra support to be able to do that,” she said.

The focus is on progressing the effectiveness of the leadership team, enhancing the staff culture and improving the overall performance of the trust.

Ms Morris confirmed there were no active discussions about ambulance trust mergers.

She said collaboration work taking place included carrying out procurement on a larger scale to get better value for money.