Following an inspection in June, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has found the South Western Ambulance Service – which serves over five million people across the region including everyone in Wiltshire – to be providing outstanding care and resilience, but that improvements are needed in some areas.
However, overall the service has been rated as ‘Requires Improvement’ – notably as to whether all its operations are safe, effective and well-led.
In the report, the CQC’s Chief Inspector, Professor Sir Mike Richards, acknowledges that as demand for emergency care grows year by year, ambulance services have never been busier: “I know that South Western Ambulance Service is at the forefront of national improvements in the ambulance service, exploring better ways to deal with emergency calls so that people get the attention they need, in the right place and at the right time.”
“The trust has a strong and stable leadership team, which has put quality and safety as key priorities and has organised the staff and resources well across a wide geographic area, responding well, on the most part, to the most urgent calls, and working closely with other NHS providers to maximise the effectiveness of the service.”
“We found staff in the emergency operations centres and emergency and urgent services to be outstanding in the way they supported people who were distressed or overwhelmed in often highly stressful situations.”
“However we also found some variation in quality across the services we inspected. There were significant gaps in mandatory training and we found the levels of staffing were not always sufficient to provide relief when staff were training, or on leave.”
“I am concerned that not all staff were reporting incidents, particularly when they were verbally abused by callers.”
The full reports on the six core services can be found here.
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