Issue - meetings

a) Tim Butcher, Assistant Director for Performance Improvement, will present the North West Ambulance Service’s Quality Account (attached) on which the Committee is invited to comment; and

b) Sarah Smith will present the current performance figures (attached).

Tim Butcher, Assistant Director for Performance Improvement, North West Ambulance Trust (NWAS) presented the NWAS Quality Account on which the Committee was invited to comment.

The vision of NWAS was “Delivering the right care, at the right time, and in the right place”.  NWAS provided a range of services:

      999 paramedic emergency service;

      Patient transport service;

      Emergency preparedness;

      Urgent Care.

The Service had 3 emergency control centres and dealt with 1.1 million 999 calls a year and carried out 2 million Patient Transport Service journeys.

The organisation focused on Quality; Performance and Finance which reflected the importance of not just focusing on response times but also ensuring the right action was taken for the patient, once an ambulance arrived.

The service faced a number of challenges including overwhelming demand for urgent care via 999, overwhelming demand for unplanned on the day patient transport and an increase in health challenges in the North West. 

The Emergency Care service needed to ensure that the national performance standards were met, it delivered against the new clinical and system indicators, minimised the number of extended waits by patients and the Control Centre infrastructure was strengthened,

The Patient Transport Service now comprised one single North West contract and a robust booking and call taking system had been introduced; eligibility criteria had been developed and applied and a bureau concept was being developed to look at the use of any available transport. 

The service had a major role in emergency situations and had to ensure it was prepared to respond to any major incidents.

In relation to Urgent Care, the service had introduced, or was involved in, a number of initiatives including Hear and Treat (advice over the phone), See and Treat, an Urgent Care Desk (where a trained paramedic would phone the caller back), the 111 national scheme was to be piloted in Blackpool (for people needing urgent, but not emergency care, to call) and the NWAS Kitemark (where centres would be awarded the kitemark because NWAS knew what service was provided there and would transport a patient there rather than Accident and Emergency, if this was more appropriate).

The Committee was aware of the response time standards which had been outlined at previous meetings and these were now to be replaced by 2 categories:

      Category A (red calls) which required a response in 8 minutes with a 19 minute transport standard; and

      Category C (green calls) which were broken down into Green 1, 2, 3 and 4 with response times and telephone assessment times to be agreed. 

There were also 13 new Quality Indicators covering various items including “outcome from cardiac arrest”, “outcome from stroke”, “time to answer call”, “service experience” and “time to treatment”. 

Tim then introduced the NWAS Quality Account.  Looking back to last year, five areas had been identified for delivering improvements: End of Life care; Frequent Callers; Chain of Survival and Complementary Resources; Acute Stroke Care and Heart Attack.  The Account outlined action taken under each heading to  ...  view the full minutes text for item 8