FOI 26-098 Routine Discharges by A&E Vehicles at Borders General Hospital
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 26-098 Routine Discharges by A&E Vehicles at Borders General Hospital
- Request Date
- 23 Feb 2026
- Response Date
- 10 Mar 2026
- Information Requested
Please advise the amount of requests to Scottish ambulance service from borders general hospital for transport home that have generated a job onto the A&E dispatch ‘stack’.
Please advise how many have subsequently been cancelled as they’ve made their own way etc. please also advise how many A&E crews have transported people home from borders general hospital.
Can you advise the amount of time lost in minutes traveled from ‘going mobile’ to ‘at scene’ and also the time lost transporting people home.
Please break this down over the last 12 months into months, and up to the date the request is actioned.
If possible, please also advise how many extended duty/over runs have been incurred by an emergency ambulance transporting a patient home.
For clarity this relates to as3 coded calls
- Response
The Scottish Ambulance Service no longer uses an “AS3” code in the tasking of vehicles. Ambulances may be tasked to a range of incident types, including emergency, timed admissions, and routine calls or discharges.
For the purposes of this request only, the Service has interpreted references to “AS3” as meaning routine calls or routine discharge activity. This interpretation has been applied solely to assist with responding to the request and does not reflect current operational coding or tasking terminology.
This information has been identified using the following criteria:
- Resource Type = Accident and Emergency
- Journey Type = Discharge Journey
- From Hospital = Borders General Hospital
This has been broken down by month from 01/01/2025 - 28/02/2026.
The Scottish Ambulance Service cannot identify cancelled discharge journeys by A&E resources therefore the information provided only includes completed journeys.
The Scottish Ambulance Service does not define the time between ‘going mobile’ and ‘at scene’ or transporting people home as ‘Lost Time’. It is for this reason we consider this as information not held. Under section 15 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002 as advice and assistance, we have provided a total resource time which is the time from an A&E vehicle is allocated until the time an A&E vehicle is cleared from a routine discharge incident from Borders Hospital.
While information on duty overruns may be held in workforce systems, it is not linked to individual incidents or patient journeys. As a result, we are unable to determine whether any extended duties were incurred specifically as a result of emergency ambulances transporting patients home without undertaking detailed manual analysis across multiple systems, which would constitute the creation of new information. It is for this reason we have applied section 17 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002 as information not held.
- Response Documents
