According to figures released by the Welsh Government on Thursday, ambulance response times for life-threatening calls in Wales were the joint slowest on record last month. Only half of red calls – those where someone is in an immediate life-threatening condition – were answered within eight minutes, a 0.7% decrease from the previous month. It’s also down 2.2% from September of last year. Despite a target of 65% of ambulances arriving at the most serious call-outs within eight minutes. Increased demand continues to put a strain on ambulance services. It was the sixteenth consecutive month in which they responded to more than a hundred of the most serious calls per day on average. In total, nearly 35,000 calls were made to the ambulance service in Wales in September, a slight decrease from August. Ambulance calls are classified into three categories, with red being the most serious. Amber” incidents are serious but not life-threatening, whereas “green” incidents are non-urgent. The proportion of calls classified as serious also increased last month, rising to 10.2%, a 6.4% increase over the previous month. In some cases, response times have been questioned, with services being chastised for being too slow on occasion. It comes as the mother of a two-year-old boy faced an eight-hour ambulance wait despite the fact that her son, Tobias, was “completely unresponsive” after having a seizure at home in Cardiff on Monday. Georgia Faith Johnson decided to drive herself to the hospital, and after Tobias became ill on the way, the call handler advised her to find a defibrillator. He was eventually transported to the University Hospital of Wales by an ambulance that happened to be passing by. Ms Johnson said that the experience had rendered her “completely helpless.” In the Welsh NHS, the average time spent in emergency departments was reduced in September, but it remains high at two hours and 49 minutes. However, three-quarters of a million people in Wales are still on treatment waiting lists.