Yeovil stroke shake-up sparks ambulance safety fears

By Laura Linham 21st May 2026

Local News by Laura Linham 5 minutes ago

Around one in five stroke patients in Somerset who ring 999 will not get an ambulance sent straight away, NHS bosses have confirmed.

The South West Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust said "between 20 and 21 per cent" of emergency calls are first handled through telephone triage, including some stroke-related calls.

The issue was raised at Somerset Council's adults and health scrutiny committee in Bridgwater on Thursday, 14 May.

Councillors were questioning NHS Somerset integrated care board over major changes to stroke care at Yeovil Hospital.

From September, the most urgent stroke patients who would previously have gone to Yeovil will instead be taken to either Dorchester or Taunton for specialist treatment.

Councillor Gill Slocombe, who chairs the committee and represents Bridgwater West, asked whether extra ambulances were needed to make sure patient safety was not put at risk.

She said: "Not all strokes are the same – with her, she started out fine and then got much worse.

"Is it the ambulances that we need? What is the area of weakness that you can identify?"

Chris Turner, SWASFT's area head of ambulance operations in Somerset, said the service could not send an ambulance to every call as soon as it came in.

He told councillors: "In a perfect world, we would have an ambulance on every street corner – but in reality, we know that is not possible.

"Where we get an emergency call into our control centres, instead of historically dispatching an ambulance to every job, we take some of our calls which are deemed to be clinically safe to be triaged by a telephone paramedic.

"We take a proportion of our calls – between 20 and 21 per cent of our call volumes – into the 'hear and treat space'."

Mr Turner said some patients are referred to other services after speaking to a paramedic, while others then have an ambulance sent.

He added: "Ideally, we would like more ambulances, but what we have we use as efficiently as possible."

Stroke calls are treated as category two emergencies by SWASFT.

The average response time for category two call-outs is 30 minutes.

Mr Turner said ambulance crews in Somerset can cover up to 250 miles during a single 11-hour shift.

He said the control centre sends the nearest available crew to an emergency, rather than waiting for an ambulance to return to its original station.

He added: "As a regional ambulance service, if one ambulance goes to Bath from Shepton Mallet or Bruton, then the likelihood is that an ambulance from Bath has moved and is responding to an emergency in Somerset.

"The same thing happens in Dorset and Devon. It is the benefit of being sandwiched between various counties.

"We look to be as efficient as possible with the resources we have. It's not as simple as just having more ambulances."