Two key articles on development and prioritization of new ambulance performance measures were published this autumn 2017 in Health Expectations. The studies come from, Prehospital Outcomes for Evidence Based Evaluation (PhOEBE), funded by a five year National Institute for Health Research Programme Grant for Applied Health Research led by Professor Niro Siriwardena from CaHRU and Janette Turner of the Centre for Urgent and Emergency care research (CURE).

The first article, ‘Prioritizing novel and existing ambulance performance measures through expert and lay consensus: a three-stage multimethod consensus study‘ involved a multistakeholder consensus event, modified Delphi study, and patient and public consensus workshop, which together identified a shortlist of ambulance outcome and performance measures important to ambulance clinicians and service providers, service users, commissioners and academics.

The final set of measures included change in pain score, accuracy of call identification, average response time, proportion of patients with a serious condition who survived to 7 days post-admission, death (within 3 days) from a low risk condition, proportion of patients transported to the Emergency Department who were discharged without treatment or investigation, and the proportion of those with specific conditions treated according to current guidelines.

The public consensus workshop, ‘A coproduced patient and public event: An approach to developing and prioritizing ambulance performance measures‘, was effective for obtaining public feedback on which ambulance performance measures were most highly favoured by lay participants. These measures have been developed to be used in future by ambulance services or commissioners to benchmark care quality between services or regions or to measure performance over time.

By Prof Niro Siriwardena