Having spent almost five years as media and communications manager with Great Western Ambulance Service (GWAS), I am clearly one of the spin doctors decried by John Craig in his latest column (June 5).

Unfortunately, his comments about South Western Ambulance Service (SWAST) indulging in creative accountancy to ‘mask’ response times to rural areas are not spin – simply plain wrong.

All ambulance services have always been required to give response times across the organisation – that is how they have been, and continue to be, measured against the eight-minute target.

SWAST (and GWAS before it) regularly makes available response information broken down by smaller parts of the patch it covers – and these are regularly and publicly commented on by commissioners and scrutiny committees, as well as the media.

More damaging are his claims that SWAST prioritises responses in urban areas to cover up deficiencies in rural areas. The truth is that the majority of patients who dial 999 are in urban areas. The former GWAS covered almost 3,000 square miles, but around 50 per cent of all 999 calls responded to occurred in just 10 per cent of that geographical area – Bristol, Bath, Swindon, Cheltenham and Gloucester.

Of course, ensuring patients in rural areas have a swift response to medical emergencies is vital and is something that every ambulance service (with the possible exception of London) grapples with daily.

Diverting ambulance crews out of urban areas, where they are fully utilised, to locations that may – or may not – generate emergency calls would mean fewer patients getting a timely response. Instead ambulance services have to look at a range of different ways to respond.

One of the methods used by SWAST is funding public-access defibrillators in local communities. That is not done simply to meet a target – in fact, these do not stop the ambulance service clock – but to ensure that patients suffering life-threatening emergencies get essential treatment while professional ambulance clinicians are en route, giving them the best chance of surviving and recovering.

As a self-confessed PR luvvie, I cheerfully accept that being called a spin doctor goes with the territory. What is harder to accept – even a year after leaving the ambulance service – is the commitment of former colleagues dismissed as playing with statistics. What I saw every day was dedicated, caring professionals – frontline clinicians and support staff – doing their best for patients, not interested in simply placating ill-informed commentators sniping from the sidelines.

John Oliver, Chippenham.