- SERVICE PROVIDER
Isle of Wight NHS Trust
This is an organisation that runs the health and social care services we inspect
Assessment report published 14 August 2026
Contents
Ratings - Emergency and urgent care
Our view of the service
The Isle of Wight Ambulance Service (IOWAS) is part of Isle of Wight NHS Trust. The emergency and urgent care service (EUC) for IOWAS has one ambulance station which is located on the site of St. Mary’s Hospital in Newport. There are multiple identified standby points across the island to support dynamic deployment, however Ryde and Shanklin fire stations provide crew rest and welfare facilities for when they are on standby in these areas.
We carried out this assessment of Emergency and Care (EUC) services from 24 to 25 February 2026. At our previous inspection in 2019 we rated the service good overall and in safe, effective, caring and responsive. We rated them as requires improvement for well led. At this assessment the overall rating remains good, and we rated them good in all key questions.
During our inspection, we spoke with 38 staff within the emergency and urgent care service, inspected vehicles, reviewed 14 patient records, and observed episodes of care. The staff we spoke with included frontline ambulance crews including paramedics and emergency care assistants. We spoke with the resourcing team, clinical support officers, operation station managers, fleet managers, volunteer manager, driving standards staff, specialist paramedics for urgent and emergency care and critical care paramedics, and clinical, education, quality and service leads.
People's experience of this service
Patients and any family or carers we spoke with were positive about how staff treated them. We spoke with 6 patients and 2 family members. They told us staff treated them with kindness and provided good care and treatment. They told us staff communicated with them well, they felt listened to and described staff as “caring” and a family member told us staff made them feel “at ease”