St John Ambulance North Region

Ratings

• Overall

  Good

• Safe

  Good

• Effective

  Good

• Caring

  Good

• Responsive

  Good

• Well-led

  Good

Our view of the service

St John Ambulance North Region is an independent ambulance service, employing 290 clinical staff with a regional headquarters based in Stockport, Manchester and ambulance hubs across the North of England including Stockport, Warrington, Preston, Liverpool, Carlisle, Hull, Ossett and Durham. Each ambulance hub has multiple emergency ambulances, which are assigned to cover for events.

From their Warrington hub St John Ambulance North Region provides paediatric and neonatal repatriation patient transport services (PTS) to specialist centres across the UK. Until June 2025 the provider had a contract for emergency response services, emergency and urgent care (EUC) for NHS ambulance and hospital trusts across the North of England.

We carried out an unannounced inspection on 1-2 July 2025 because we received information that gave us concerns about the safety and quality of the service. Our inspection focused on 10 quality statements across our key questions for safe, effective and well-led. We have combined the scores for these areas with scores from the last inspection.

During our inspection we visited the service’s hubs in Stockport and Warrington. We spoke with 6 staff who worked at the service and 2 operations managers. In addition, we spoke with the registered manager and senior leaders of the services. We sampled records and quality monitoring documents, and reviewed additional information the registered manager sent us after our inspection visit.

At this inspection we inspected the two assessment service groups, St John Ambulance North Region provide, Patient Transport Services (PTS), this was the main service group provided and Emergency and Urgent care (EUC).

At the last inspection the overall location rating was good. At this inspection, the overall rating for St John Ambulance North Region remains good.