Agenda item

Peter Rhodes, Assistant Director of Operations, London Ambulance Service, was in attendance and made a presentation to the Committee, a copy of which is interleaved.

During consideration of the presentation the following main points were made –

·         Approximately 25% of Londoners are not registered with a GP and there are significant health inequalities and variations in life expectancy

·         The LAS is the only pan London provider working with 32 Trusts, 32 Clinical Commissioning Groups, operating in seven clusters, seven System Resilience Groups, five Urgent and Emergency Care networks

·         Demand for services is increasing year on year and in 2014/15 there were over 1.7 million requests. Operating budget is £316m and has 5,000 staff, 71% of which are frontline

·         There is a changing workforce with more graduates, women and a higher turnover of staff and expectations. Transformation is taking place with a management restructure of frontline staff and recruitment drives

·         The LAS main contract is to provide emergency service and urgent care ambulance (999) contract and is commissioned by NHS Brent CCG on behalf of all the 32 CCG’s across London

·         It is an annual contract which runs between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2016 and operates 24 hours a day, for 365 days per year and the contract value is £267m per annum

·         The 3 main challenges are staffing where morale needed to be improved as well as increasing staff numbers. There is also an ever increasing demand on services and the LAS will need to continue to find new and innovative ways of managing demand. The culture and management style of the organisation also needs to change as evidenced by staff feedback and external surveys

·         In terms of recruitment LAS are running a national and international recruitment campaign for frontline staff, targeting Australian paramedics and increasing the number of places available at UK universities. Approximately 820 staff will be recruited this financial year, which includes 150 new posts

·         In terms of performance LAS reached 75% of Category A calls in just over 10 minutes in 2014/15 and are now reaching 75% of Category A calls in just over 9 minutes so far in 2015/16. LAS work closely with the CCG and all the Acute Trusts in North Central London to develop pathways and reduce patient wait times

·         Most patients are conveyed to the Whittington (31%) followed by UCLH (22%)

·         In response to a question it was stated that it is mainly young people that did not register with a GP and that they tended to go straight to A&E

·         LAS stated that staff in the staff survey in 2014 had indicated that they were concerned about the culture of management and a lot of work has taken place on improving local management who were visible to staff. There is also a new Chief Executive who is well respected by staff

·         It was noted that the 2015 staff survey is now currently taking place

·         A Member enquired whether there had been any improvement in recruitment of BME staff and the LAS stated that they would provide these figures to Members following the meeting

·         In response to a question it was stated that the loss of staff contributed to the reduction in the Category A responses in 2014 and that one of the reasons why staff had left the LAS is that other services outside London are offering higher pay rates which the LAS could not compete with and that this had also affected staff morale

·         It was stated that  the utilisation rate of staff is around 90/95% which is very high and staff worked 12 hour shifts and this is tiring for staff and is far too high

·         LAS worked well with the 111 service and did not think the referrals made were generally unnecessary or unreasonable, however there is a need generally to reduce attendance at A&E

·         In response to a question the LAS stated that it would be useful if schools and colleges could be targeted to encourage children to train to be paramedics, however this would involve additional resources, however Health Education England had been approached in order to increase funding and training to encourage more paramedics and it is also important to retain existing paramedics

RESOLVED:

That the LAS provide the Committee with the closing date of the 2015/16 staff survey and the recruitment details of BME staff to the service and whether there had been an improvement in this

The Chair thanked Peter Rhodes for attending and his presentation