Patient Ambulance Services (Littleborough)

Updated 19 March 2018

Patient Ambulance Service (Little borough) is based in Rochdale in Greater Manchester and opened in 2008. It is a private ambulance service that offers pre booked transport to the NHS and private health care sector in the North West of England. We inspected this site.

Patient Ambulance Service also has a small satellite service in Yorkshire, which it uses as a base site for one of its present NHS contracts. We did not inspect this site.

The regulatory services provided by Patient Ambulance Service include transport services, triage and remote medical advice.

The service presently has two NHS contracts which it provides through a brokerage system managed by a private organisation.

Patient Ambulance Service has four functional ambulances in use at any one time with two crew in each. The service has two back up vehicles if and when required.

The owner of the company acts as the service manager and is also the regulatory manager. The owner has previous experience as a ambulance crew member.

At this inspection, the service was inspected under the new regulatory framework for independent ambulance providers.

In the course of day to day business, the manger is supported by a human resource (HR) consultant and six ambulance crew on zero hour’s contracts.

Updated 19 March 2018

Patient Ambulance Service (Littleborough) is operated by Patient Ambulance Service and provides a patient transport service.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. The inspection was announced and carried out on 3 October 2017.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we ask the same five questions of all services: are they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well-led?

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

Services we do not rate

We regulate independent ambulance services but we do not currently have a legal duty to rate them. We highlight good practice and issues that service providers need to improve and take regulatory action as necessary.

We found the following areas of good practice:

• There were policies and procedures that guided staff on the reporting of any incidents or concerns.

• There were no serious incidents (that led to patient harm) or patient deaths reported during this period.

• We were able to see concerns were investigated. The service had a low number of incidents which were minor in nature.

• There were no cleanliness concerns for the three patient transport vehicles we reviewed. Staff were visibly clean and had received training on infection control.

• We found evidence that Patient Ambulance Service had systems in place to monitor the maintenance of ambulances.

• We found evidence that Patient Ambulance Service had systems in place to monitor its equipment.

• The service had a safeguarding policy. All staff had signed the safeguarding policy.

• Staff were clear on how to verbally report safeguarding concerns to commissioners and also to the manager of the service.

• We saw evidence of a comprehensive induction process for staff with a checklist of mandatory training modules which needed to be completed and personal documentation which needed to be reviewed.

• We found that the staff were confident in responding to risk and understood what process they would follow.

• We found staff demonstrated a good understanding of people’s needs particularly in terms of elderly patients and those needing extra support.

• We found that the service and staff were caring, from patient feedback we were given in the course of the inspection.

• We found that the service was well led and staff valued the organisation and the manager.

However, we also found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve.

• The service needed to review its incident recording system.

• The service needed to review its safeguarding recording system.

• The service needed to review its data sharing arrangements with its commissioners. It was unable to provide any clear data on journeys undertaken and number of patients seen on a yearly basis.

• The service need to review its supervision policy and also implement structured team meetings.

• The service needed to review its policies and procedures intermittently with staff.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it should make improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve.

Professor Edward Baker

Chief Inspector of Hospitals