PAS Awarded London North West Healthcare NHS Trust Contract
Private Ambulance Service Ltd was awarded the contract for the provision of patient transport services to the London North West Healthcare Trust in December 2015, with a commencement date of 1st February 2016.
Please continue reading the full article to find out how we managed to turn over the service with only a number of weeks to implement, which also fell over the Christmas period...
In order to meet the short timescales, which only allowed a 7 week implementation that also fell during the Christmas period, an internal implementation team was set up under the leadership of the Locality Director, Carl Carter. Individual members were tasked with elements of the programme to ensure their areas of responsibility were on target. The group met regularly to review the progress made and to ascertain any problems encountered or likely to be encountered. The programme included the procurement of all types of vehicles, equipment, medical supplies, IT infrastructure, new premises and recruitment & training.
As part of the Implementation, each Community Group was visited to gain an understanding of their individual requirements and consideration given to their client’s needs. Such groups include the Pulmonary Rehabilitation group that meets at St Mary’s Church Hall 2 days a week. On completion of this exercise, an overview of the contract was then drawn up which dictated the vehicle numbers and types required as well as the allocation of resources across the piece.
In addition to the Implementation team meetings, weekly meetings were set up with the Trust to review progress being made in all areas.
A third series of meetings took place with the then current providers to ensure a smooth hand over of the service, successful TUPE transfer of existing staff and transfer of patient journey bookings that existed on the booking system.
The contract saw the requirement to amalgamate 2 x control rooms with Managers, Planners, controllers and administrative staff all joining together under the one roof at Central Middlesex Hospital control room.
New vehicles were gleaned from all parts of the UK and Ireland and any shortfalls in availability was covered by the temporary hire of vehicles and the utilisation of agreed sub-contractors.
The weekend prior to commencement saw all staff reporting to their current employees armed with their old uniforms, equipment and vehicles and these were all duly exchanged with PAS uniforms, vehicles etc.
Having met the current staff regularly, a majority of them transferred across to PAS and reported for duty on day 1.
As a majority of the Trust book transport for patients through an online booking process and directly onto our transport booking system, training was provided by PAS throughout the Trust to ensure all staff were competent on booking journeys and booking patients ready on completion of their appointment. This system also provides visibility for each department to see the patients traveling in each day.
Since the commencement of the contract PAS has increased the number of crews to 55 per day providing some 79 driving staff working across all sites and 8 new Office staff, in addition to those originally managers and controllers.
Following a rather hectic 1st month of the contract identified improvements were made to raise the quality of the service being provided.
A call waiting facility was added to the control room to ensure calls were answered within a given time scale. During the course of a month a total of almost 14,000 calls are made and received through the control room and it was important to reduce the waiting times for callers to get through to the control room staff. It also provided a means to monitor the waiting times and to redirect calls to other parts of the business should there be any excessive times.
Throughout the first 3 months of the contract, the quality of service has improved month on month and we continue to strive to exceed the standards set by the Trust.
Recruitment of new employees has continued throughout this time and following training courses we have been able to reduce the sub- contractors that supported us from the start of the contract. In addition to training of new recruits, we have also completed the upgrading of staff that transferred from other providers to the required standard set out by the Trust within the contract specification.
Further changes to the set-up have included the relocation of the Control to our Head Office site in Basildon and the engagement of Team leaders for both main Hospital sites.
Every patient is contacted the day prior to travel to confirm appointment time, mobility, address and any special notes. This reduces the aborted journeys and gives the patient a window of time to be ready for transport to arrive. A new service is due to commence which provides the patient with a text once the allocated vehicle commences the run alerted the patient that the driver is on their way to the patient’s address.
As with all of our services, we are consistently reassessing the effectiveness of our operations and making changes accordingly to ensure a smooth running operation.