Agenda item

Durham Dales, Easington and Sedgefield CCG Accident and Emergency Ambulance Service Review - Post Implementation update

Minutes:

The Committee received a report of the Director of Partnership and Transformation that provided Members with a further update in respect of the implementation of the revised Accident and Emergency Ambulance Service by Durham Dales, Easington and Sedgefield CCG which commenced on 1 April 2016 (for copy of report, see file of minutes).

 

The Assistant Director gave a presentation that highlighted the following:-

 

  • Staff who would recommend NEAS as a place to work
  • Workforce – closing the vacancy gap
  • Staff turnover and vacancies
  • Transportation to A&E
  • Sickness absence rates
  • Handover delay
  • Context – Reference costs and quality
  • Income – National Audit office report – 2017
  • Cost improvement plan
  • Address the gap – progress to CQC Outstanding
  • Red Response Performance
  • Green and urgent response performance
  • Conveyance to emergency department
  • Positive direction of travel
  • Current response time standards
  • Ambulance performance standards
  • Ambulance call volumes
  • Performance
  • Ambulance standards
  • Arrival at a specialist heart or stroke centre

 

The Chairman thanked the Assistant Director for a very informative presentation and asked him to pass on the committee’s thanks for all the work the ambulance service nationally had done during the terrorist attacks.

 

Councillor Bell referred to the funding discrepancies between NEAS and other ambulance services and asked what representations had been made, he also referred to the performance and was concerned that 25% of responses were not counted. Rural areas had longer wait times but the graph did not provide the responses in the Dales as the data included Crook, which was not a rural area.

 

The Assistant Director responded that a study of rural areas found that the response rates were seven minutes longer for rural areas but an ambulance on its way to a rural area would not get deflected elsewhere as was sometimes the case in urban areas.

 

Paul Liversidge, NEAS referred to national funding being an issue and as a service they were monitored trust wide on local point of view. Challenges in urban areas were different to rural areas. They needed to make sure they worked together with health professionals to manage patients in rural areas, in particular the Durham Dales.

 

Councillor Patterson asked for further information on incidents across County Durham particular figures rather than percentages.

 

The Assistant Director responded that he had an excel spreadsheet that contained all the figures and that he was happy to share with Members of the Committee. He also advised members that no ambulance service was measured on the new standards. With regard to staffing they worked with universities and in the last 12 months they had recruited paramedics from Poland and other parts of the country.

 

Councillor Patterson sought clarification if it was 17,000 or 30,000 incidents a month. The Chief Operating Officer confirmed that it was 30,000 incidents in total as it was not just red incidents.

 

The Rural Ambulance Monitoring Group were in attendance and indicated that they hoped the standard would help improve response times in rural areas. The last figures for the Dales and Bishop Auckland was 64% and 44% which was a 20% difference. There were several rural areas around the County and they would like to see a further breakdown of the figures. The group was set up by the PCT to monitor rural performance which they had done for the last 12 years and the rural service was failing. They worked closely with the PCT but they had not been able to obtain the figures for Weardale and Teesdale localities and if they don’t have the figures to see what is going wrong they can’t put it right.

 

Councillor Bell referred to previous discussions held at this Committee when NEAS had indicated that the data for ambulance response performance could not be broken down to a more localised level as this would contravene data protection rules and possibly lead to the identification of individual incidents. He stated that he did not agree with this assertion and called for the figures to be broken down to a more localised level.

 

The Chairman indicated that he and Councillor Temple regularly attended meetings to talk about the ambulance performance across the Durham Dales and the rest of the County. If the Committee were so minded, the Chairman suggested that he again write to NEAS requesting that the ambulance performance data be broken down to a more localised level.

 

Resolved:

That the information contained in the report be noted and a request for the Ambulance performance information to be broken down into a more local level be made to NEAS.

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