Absolutely. The 8 minute target is not there because ambulance crews are driving slowly! The target's purpose is to improve the organisational process as a whole - if you have an 8 minute response time target which absolutely must be met, then organisational change will ensue in order to create a system whereby it is possible for a call to be answered within this time, whether this be by means of a community first responder, first response unit, ambulance, or whoever. If there is an organisational culture in which it is unacceptable to delay your down time inbetween jobs, and thus make yourself available for more emergency calls, then this is all for the better. It may be irritating, but if it is then it's doing its job - if someone had just told you that you need to be quicker leaving the hospital it wouldn't really register in your conscience. If you are given a reasonable amount of time on each job then nagged, then it encourages you to speed up. I don't work in the LAS, but I'm sure the idea is not to rush you into providing bad care, but just to keep you on your toes a little. I agree it's annoying, but if it's brought the issue into your consciousness then it may just be doing its job. I'm by and large a sceptic of targets in healthcare as I believe they tend to measure meaningless things and are usually met by shortcuts rather than actually improving care, but this is one which absolutely does improve clinical outcomes and is extremely important. I'm sure you'd all agree that time is of the essence in these life & death emergencies, and anything which speeds up the response is a good thing. A figure of 8 minutes doesn't mean that someone who's reached at 7:30 is going to live and someone at 8:30 is going to die. It means that, in general, people do better if they are responded to quicker, and for these types of patients 8 minutes should be regarded as the minimum acceptable timeframe in which to respond. What on earth is wrong with this?