PEOPLE living in the Bordon area could be the losers because of a new system which means that ambulances are sited near strategic accident black spots and not at their stations.

According to Basingstoke and North Hampshire Community Health Council chief officer Chris Marsh-Jenks, while the choice of sites is based on historic data, it can mean that 999 calls made in areas furthest away from these sites experience a slower response time.

In a recent case an Alton family had to wait for almost half an hour in for an ambulance to come from Basingstoke after their one-year-old daughter became very ill. She later died in hospital.

Hampshire Ambulance Service spokesman Liz Rees said that for practical reasons ambulances did not sit at their stations waiting for calls and that the nearest ambulance would respond to a 999 call.

Since the beginning of this year, new government standards have required ambulance services to improve their response times.

The target is for 75 per cent of all life-threatening calls to be attended to within eight minutes and 95 per cent of other 999 calls within 19 minutes.

Because of a lack of resources and the need for a new command and control centre, which is now up and running, Hampshire has been behind other authorities in meeting these new targets.

However, while in May the response to the eight-minute standard was just 38.2 per cent, it has since risen to 75 per cent, said Ms Rees.

While acknowledging that progress is now being made, Mrs Marsh-Jenks, said that the CHC had been concerned for some time about the response times of Hampshire Ambulance Service and had called an urgent meeting to discuss the matter.

"It has put up a very poor performance in terms of meeting response-time targets. This is not an acceptable standard bearing in mind the additional funding received from the health authority to improve the service," she said.

She is urging people to attend the public meeting at Alton College, this Wednesday (July 25) when health service chiefs will explain proposals which could reshape the way ambulance services are delivered in the south east region.

The consultation document, currently under discussion, sets out a preferred option of creating three new ambulance trusts, one of which would see the merger of Hampshire with Surrey.

While Hampshire is classified as a rural county with ambulance response times affected to a greater extent by distance rather than by volume of traffic, Surrey is classified as urban with traffic being the major factor.

Nonetheless, Surrey has much better response times and the CHC is hoping that this will prove a positive factor in any merger.

"The CHC is very aware of the problems and will be monitoring response times closely," said Mrs Marsh-Jenks.

She would like to hear from anyone who has experienced delays in ambulance response times in the Bordon area in a bid to try to secure parity of service throughout the whole of the CHC area.

Chris Marsh-Jenks may be contacted on 01256 350348