Emergency services 'should respond to calls within eight minutes'

A new report has said emergency services should respond to immediately life-threatening emergency calls like heart attacks within eight minutes.

The Health Information and Quality Authority said ambulance services should start the recommendations straight away.

The report also called for service providers to begin publicly reporting their response-time performance later this year.

HIQA Director Jon Billings said the absence of set time-frames for emergency calls has been a major gap in the country's emergency response service.