North East Ambulance emergency care ‘requires improvement’

The Care Quality Commission have said an ambulance trust, which was criticised in a damning report, still needs to make improvements to some of its services.

Although the CQC said the North East Ambulance Service had made “some improvement” and moved them from “inadequate” to “requires improvement”, the health watchdog identified concerns during a new inspection of the trust’s emergency and urgent care services.

The new inspection in April and May of this year, which focussed on NEAS’s emergency and urgent care and not the trust as a whole, still found issues with medicines, with stock levels not being accurately recorded and some not being stored correctly.

The CQC said that although the process for controlled drugs did show signs of improvement, a audit revealed “poor record keeping” and found patients were still being put at risk.

Inspectors also found that there were still issues with how staff felt when incidents were reported and whether they were confident any action would be taken.  It added that although there was “evidence that incidents were being addressed” quicker, 36 per cent of staff surveyed felt that when mistakes were reported, the trust took action.

Helen Ray, chief executive of the trust, said the upgraded rating was “testament to the hard work and effort” made by staff in “different teams across the service on our journey of improvement.

“The swift action we have taken since the first inspection has ensured we have made good progress, but given the short time since the last CQC report in February, we recognise there is still more to do to embed the changes we’ve introduced.”

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Posted by Karen Motley, Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (jacquelinevance@chadlaw.co.uk), medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.

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