FOI T187/24 - Transport To Hospital

You asked:

I would like you to provide me with the available data or statistics of the below incidents, ranging from January 2019 to January 2024.

1. The number of patients that were taken to hospitals in patrol vehicles, because there was a shortage of ambulances.

2. The number of patients taken to hospitals in a patrol vehicle - Cases registered on deaths occurred inside an ambulance, due to medical negligence.

3. The number of cases reported or registered against an ambulance worker.

4. The number of cases reported or registered against doctors or medical workers due to the death of a patient happened inside an ambulance.

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with both the Communications and Corporate Development Departments of Northumbria Police.

Information Commissioners Office (ICO) guidelines state that:

A public authority must confirm or deny whether it holds the information requested unless the cost of this alone would exceed the appropriate limit.

We can neither confirm nor deny that the information you require is held by Northumbria Police as to actually determine if it is held would exceed the permitted 18 hours therefore Section 12(2) of the Freedom of Information Act would apply. This section does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimated that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours, equating to £450.00

You should consider this to be a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Act for your request.

We have set out the reasons for this below.

We can confirm that the information requested is not held statistically and it is not held in a format that would allow its extraction from systems within the permitted 18-hour threshold.

The information you have requested at points 3 and 4 refers to an individual’s occupation, in this case, for crimes recorded by Northumbria Police where offender/suspect is recorded as an ambulance worker, doctor or medical worker. After assessing your request, we can confirm that the data collection regime applied for this reporting mechanism does not mandate that the occupation of an offender/suspect is provided. If we were to provide you with specific details of offender/suspect occupation, we would be required to extract the relevant crime data from locally held systems and each recorded crime would require manual interrogation to determine whether the suspects occupation was recorded and if so, if the occupation recorded was relevant to your request.

In considering this, we have conservatively estimated that to undertake the tasks associated with providing you with an accurate and relevant response would equate to approximately 5 minutes per record, however each crime, of which there are thousands over the period requested to be manual interrogation in order to provide a response to you. Clearly this is not a task which can be achieved within the time constraints of the act and as such S12 is applicable.

Simalarily, the data you have requested at point 1 and 2, cannot be supplied as a manual search of all incidents that were noted as involving an ambulance issue would need to be carried out.  This would entail accessing two different recording systems that were used in the time period requested.  Limiting searches to the most recent recording system used, searches for a one-year period return in excess of 620 incidents, and each would need to be manually reviewed to establish how many occasions the force used patrol vehicles to take people to hospital because an ambulance was not available.  Even at a conservative estimate of 6 minutes per record, which we have considered as a reasonable minimum, we have estimated that to extract this information alone would take over 62 hours, further time would then be needed to provide a response to the remainder of your submission.  Again Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act would apply.

We have considered your request and whether there is a realistic possibility of assisting you by refining the remit of your request. Unfortunately, given that the parameters are already clearly defined, it has not been possible on this occasion for us to assist you further and unfortunately we are unable to provide you with any of the information you have requested.