Ambulance Activity and Response Times

St John WA is committed to providing a high-quality ambulance service for Western Australians.

St John believes community trust is critical to its work and therefore it shares performance information with the community, including how quickly we are able to arrive at the scene, and the time it takes to transfer the patient to the care of the Emergency Department (ED). 

Our commitment to the community of Western Australia is that we will arrive within 15 minutes during a life-threatening emergency in the metropolitan area or a maximum of 60 minutes in less urgent situations. 

The hospital aims to receive all patients within 30 minutes of our arrival at the ED. If it takes longer than 30 minutes, this is referred to as ramping.

Our ability to deliver on our commitments is made more difficult when demand is particularly high and/or there are delays in transferring care of our patient to the hospital ED.

Based on our intention to continue learning about how we can improve, we look at these indicators to identify opportunities. Here you can see how we compare the response times and ramping data against previous months and years to identify trends, issues and hotspots.

The data is available for all metropolitan Emergency Departments and four major Country hospitals - Albany, Bunbury, Geraldton and Northam.

St John is working collaboratively within the WA health system on strategies to improve these outcomes for the community.

Response Times

Response time is measured as the time from when the call comes into the St John WA State Operations Centre to when an ambulance arrives at the scene.

Response times are a key indicator in measuring our performance. Our metropolitan response time targets are as follows:

• Attend to 90 per cent of priority 1 (emergency) calls within 15 minutes
• Attend to 90 per cent of priority 2 (urgent) calls within 25 minutes
• Attend to 90 per cent of priority 3 (non-urgent) calls within 60 minutes

The charts below show response performance and case volume for the metropolitan area. 

You can filter the date range and select which case priority you want to display. This will allow you to see trends in response times and case volume.

The dials on the left side provide a snapshot of performance for yesterday. 

Extended Transfer of Care (Ramping) 

Hospitals aim to receive all patients within 30 minutes of our arrival at the ED. If it takes longer than 30 minutes, this is referred to as ramping. We therefore record the time (in hours) that ambulances are parked outside a hospital, waiting to handover the care of the patient.

Increased hours of ramping can have a significant impact on response times for that day. Measuring ramping does not in itself address the challenges the health system faces but may assist in understanding the contributing factors. With this being the intention, we measure and report on ramping to assess how our collaborative strategies within the health system are improving outcomes for the community.

The charts below show ramped hours by hospital and/or over time.

You can use the options on the left to select the chart type, comparison period and hospitals displayed.

Notes: 
Changes to the way ramping is calculated have been applied to historical data to allow comparisons to be made. However, changes to St John WA or WA Health business processes may have affected ramped hours. As such, caution is advised when comparing data over long periods. 

FYTD values from the bar chart may vary slightly from the sums of corresponding monthly values in the trend chart, due to how figures are aggregated in the different types of charts.