Ambulance response times rising, especially in rural areas
Netherlands residents have to wait longer and longer for ambulance assistance in an emergency. The ambulance services are increasingly exceeding the response standards of arriving at an emergency within 15 minutes. There are even 63 villages and districts where the ambulance arrives late more often than not, RTL Nieuws reports based on data from the RIVM obtained through the Open Government Act.
According to RTL, the Ministry of Public Health made the data public despite objections from ambulance services. The broadcaster analyzed almost 3 million ambulance responses from 2019 to 2023.
According to the national response time standard, 95 percent of ambulance response times to emergencies must be within 15 minutes. RTL found that between 2019 and 2023, the ambulance services didn’t achieve that target once. In 2023, 9.3 percent of urgent response times were longer than 15 minutes.
In Ameide and Tienhoven, villages that fall under Vijfheerlanden, ambulances arrived late in over 85 percent of emergency responses. In the municipality of Baarle-Nassau, 56.5 percent of emergency ambulance responses took longer than 15 minutes.
Ambulancezorg Nederland (AZN), the trade association for the 25 regional ambulance services, told RTL Nieuws that response time is not the only factor that determines good care. Though it acknowledged that faster is better in life-threatening situations. According to the AZN, time is “all-important” in about 5 percent of all responses with the highest possible urgency. “It is therefore not necessary for ambulances to arrive within 15 minutes in all cases, or in 95 percent of the cases.”
According to the AZN, longer response times have to do with increased demand for emergency response and staff shortages. Another cause is that more and more Dutch people live too far from a post to be reached within 15 minutes, largely due to more traffic, speed-reducing measures, and fewer ambulance pots with permanent staffing. According to the RIVM, the percentage of Dutch people who cannot be reached within 15 minutes increased from 0.5 percent in 2019 to 2.1 percent last year.
AZN chairman Han Noten said that exceeding the response time standard does not immediately mean that good care is at stake. “I can imagine that people are worried but that is really not necessary.”
That is not very reassuring for the villages and neighborhoods where ambulances arrive later on a structural basis. “Everyone in the Netherlands is entitled to good and fast care, even if you live in a remote area. And it can’t be the case that if you happen to live in a small village, you are left to your fate,” said mayor Sjors Fröhlich of Vijfheerlanden, where ambulances arrived late in 30 percent of the cases between 2019 and 2023.
“Of course, you should not focus blindly on the standards, but if they are structurally exceeded for years by enormous percentages, then something is simply not right. There will always be areas where it is difficult. You cannot place an ambulance on every street corner, but the way things are now is unacceptable,” Fröhlich said to RTL. “Because it cannot be the case that you know for sure that the ambulance will arrive too late if you live in Ameide or Tienhoven. That is simply not possible.”
