Over the last few weeks, I have seen a number of your readers, members of the public and councillors comment on our proposals to close the Community Ambulance Stations (CAS) in Bridgnorth, Craven Arms, Market Drayton and Oswestry.

The overriding message is that you are concerned about healthcare across Shropshire and particularly in these four areas. I too share those concerns. Due to the increased emergency activity our crews are literally responding to emergency after emergency. No crews are left on these local stations or indeed our hubs in Shrewsbury and Telford – they are all out responding to patients. Apart from crew changeover and their meal breaks there are no crews based at these CAS points; they are empty.

I have committed my 35-year career to ensuring that we run the best ambulance service we can so that we can get to patients quickly and save as many lives as possible. That is the exact reason why we are proposing to close these CAS sites; so that we can save more lives.

Under these proposals, the same number of ambulance staff and the same number of ambulances will continue to operate in the area. However, by closing the CAS sites we will be able to increase the amount of ambulance time available to respond to patients.

CAS sites are an inefficient way of running the ambulance service. Because we have them, we lose thousands of hours of ambulance time each year, time that our fantastic staff could be responding to patients. By removing the four sites in Shropshire, we will be able to respond to hundreds of additional cases each year, cases where currently patients wait longer for a response than necessary.

I share the concerns many of you have with the current response times; they are too long, but that is mainly down to the extraordinary amount of time that my crews spend waiting to offload patients outside hospitals. I have great sympathy for the hard working staff in those A&E departments because they too are seeing large increases in demand while still working with Covid procedures. However, the reality of the situation is that the delays cause a disproportionately large impact on our ability to get to patients quickly.

A number of commentators have suggested that we consider alternative sites, but that would not improve the situation because we would continue to lose thousands of hours of ambulance time and patients would carry on waiting longer than they need to. We are duty bound to run the most efficient ambulance service we can, so that we can get to patients as quickly as we can and save as many lives as possible in all areas; closing the CAS points will allow us to do that. By asking us to keep them open, we are being asked to make patients wait longer for a response than necessary and that cannot be right.

Anthony Marsh,

Chief Executive Officer at West Midlands Ambulance Service.