999 calls

Freedom of Information (FOI) Act request ref: 23/0963

Version Date: 01/09/2023

The Performance Analysis Department have provided the following information:

I write, under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, to request the number of 999 calls where responses exceeded your internal response time targets, between July 2022 and July 2023.

As part of this request, I would like the information to be broken down into the following:

i) The number of 999 calls received between July 2022 and July 2023, broken down into months, and a grand total; 

Month / Year	999 Calls Received	999 Calls Resulting in a Grade 1 Incident
July 22	13,449	2093
August 22	13,186	2160
September 22	10,847	1723
October 22	11,205	1832
November 22	10,409	1624
December 22	10,373	1752
January 23	10,371	1715
February 23	10,470	1546
March 23	11,037	1746
April 23	11,351	1710
May 23	13,802	1763
June 23	14,807	1784
July 23	13,663	1560
Total	154,970	23,008

ii) Out of these 999 calls, how many were flagged as no unit/resource available, and how many were not attended within 15 minutes

Number not attended in 15 mins: 8,780

No unit available: not recorded 

iii) Your incident response time targets, and how many times these targets were missed during the above time frame;

Target: within 20 minutes

24% were outside target

iv) The average time for a 999 call to be attended; 

16.3 minutes

v) The longest period of time for a 999 call to be attended. 

363 minutes

 

Please note the following context from the Call Management and Communication Department:

The number not attended in 15 minutes is not a measure that Dorset Police use as we have a 20 minute target, so this is irrelevant and is also not a target widely used nationally.

When looking at the longest time and the percentage of incidents not attended within 20 minutes it is important to note that many grade 1 incidents will be downgraded following dynamic risk assessments following updated or new information i.e., a potential serious road traffic collision with a car in the middle of an arterial road with an update that the vehicle has been moved off the carriageway prior to police attendance.

There are some incidents which will be accurately graded as 2 (Attendance within 60 minutes) or grade 3 (Attendance within 48 hours) initially where there is little threat, but further information is received which raises the risk and the incident will be re-graded as 1. These do not change the original start time hence the response will be longer than the grade times would suggest. For example, a theft has occurred, but further information indicates the offender has returned to scene.