Dear Stakeholder April 2013 Welcome to the latest edition of the Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust (YAS) stakeholder update, a bi-monthly bulletin to keep you briefed on the Trust s performance, key priorities and latest news. In this issue you can find out about: delivery of the A&E Red performance standard quarter four 2012-13 challenges - activity and adverse weather our emergency operation centres receiving the Accredited Centre of Excellence (ACE) award our newly appointed Clinical Director of NHS 111 and Urgent Care NHS 111 service mobilisation our Foundation Trust journey praise for a YAS crew who delivered a baby in North Yorkshire. Please circulate to colleagues as appropriate within your organisation. If you have any comments about any of the articles or would like more detailed information, please email corp-comms@yas.nhs.uk or telephone 01924 584035. For more information about Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust and to keep up-todate with Trust news, please visit our website www.yas.nhs.uk Chief Executive s Update The 2012-13 year has now come to an end and I am pleased to report that YAS achieved the 75% Red 8-minute and 95% 19-minute performance standards for our A&E service for the second successive year. This is a significant achievement and represents our improving quality despite an increase in demand of over 4%. Quarter Four 2012-13 Challenges During the last quarter of 2012-13 we were faced with challenging weather conditions as well as the increase in demand for our services, but thanks to the dedication and hard work of all our staff we managed to continue providing a high-quality service for our patients - whether it was in an emergency or to ensure they received their vitally important renal dialysis treatment. Our extensive warning and informing media campaign helped to make the public aware of taking extra care in the snow and ice and using our 999 service appropriately. A&E Workforce Changes Many of you will no doubt have seen coverage in the media about changes to our A&E workforce and the introduction of the Emergency Care Assistant (ECA) role as an integral part of our plan. ECAs will work alongside paramedics on ambulances in a role which has been used successfully for a number of years in other ambulance services to deliver an
appropriate level of clinical support to their paramedic colleagues. They are also trained to undertake emergency blue light response driving. The key changes in the five-year A&E Workforce Plan focus upon the following: Simplifying the A&E workforce model. Significantly increasing the number of qualified paramedics. Retaining our tier of paramedics with additional clinical skills. Ensuring that there will be no reduction in the overall number of staff working on the emergency service - no compulsory redundancies. Pay protection arrangements to ensure that no A&E staff have any reduction in their current level of pay over the next five years. Availability of a broad range of fully-funded training opportunities for hundreds of staff to enable them to progress to more senior roles in the future, as well as ensuring that existing staff are given the best opportunity possible to become paramedics. These changes will ensure that we continue to deliver the best possible clinical outcomes for patients, achieve a sustainable level of performance in response to emergencies and balance our budget over each of the coming five years. Our absolute focus throughout this process has been to ensure that we continue to deliver a safe, responsive and high quality service to the people of Yorkshire over the coming years. We have also sought to ensure we protect the current employment and future career prospects of our A&E staff as much as we possibly can during these challenging economic times. Also making the news during recent weeks has been the industrial action taken by some of our staff who are Unite the Union members. This followed the difficult decision taken by the Trust to derecognise the union due to the disappointing relationship with them over a prolonged period and their lack of constructive contribution to the difficult decisions we have been required to make for the future. On 2 April 2013 during their 24-hour strike we were able to minimise disruption to our services using contingency plans which stayed very focused on providing safe and responsive care for our patients. The strike action involved less than 10% of the total staff employed by the Trust with the vast majority of our staff working as normal. The Trust continues to have an effective and professional working relationship with Unison, the largest trade union representing ambulance workers in Yorkshire. Yorkshire Ambulance Service s Emergency Operations Centres Awarded the Accredited Centre of Excellence (ACE) In February the Trust was awarded the Accredited Centre of Excellence (ACE) status from the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch (IAED) for our emergency call handling and dispatch. The accreditation is awarded to emergency services that can demonstrate superior performance in training, quality assurance and improvement process and/or management, and very high compliance to protocol within their communication centre environments.
As both of our Emergency Operations Centres (EOCs) in Wakefield and York have been accredited we have actually achieved multi-site Centre of Excellence. We are now only one of 118 emergency services currently accredited internationally. Since the merger of ambulance services in England in 2006, we are only the second of the ambulance trusts in England to have achieved Centre of Excellence status and we are the first in the country to receive this accreditation operating the new performance standards, which were introduced part-way through our application process. It has taken over 12 months of very hard work to demonstrate consistent achievement of compliance against the standards every month and providing evidence of continuing improvements to the service we provide to our patients. Yorkshire Ambulance Service s New Clinical Director of NHS 111 and Urgent Care The Trust has appointed Dr Philip Foster as its new Clinical Director of NHS 111 and Urgent Care. Dr Foster, who joined the Trust in February, has spent 32 years in General Practice in Retford, North Nottinghamshire, and has been the Clinical Governance Lead for NHS Bassetlaw since its inception and Medical Director there since 2011. In 2011-12 he became Medical Director of the South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Cluster and the NHS 111 Clinical Lead in this region. With a keen interest in patient care and the development of local health services, Dr Foster has also been the Medical Director of Bassetlaw Hospital where he still provides clinical sessions and he was the Chair of North Nottinghamshire Local Medical Committee. We are pleased to welcome Dr Foster to the Trust at this exciting time. NHS 111 Mobilisation The new NHS 111 service is being rolled out in this region in a phased approach between 5 March 2013 and the end of June 2013. NHS 111 is now live for the whole of Yorkshire and the Humber and GP out-of-hours (OOH) call handling in West Yorkshire and Bassetlaw which equates to 60% of the total contract. Further roll-out of the remaining OOH call handling is due to take place during May and June 2013, with North Lincolnshire starting from 23 April 2013. You will have heard and seen concerns raised in the national media about the introduction of the new NHS 111 service. For a new service NHS 111 is performing well in our region and achieving the majority of its key performance indicators. Patients calling NHS 111 are being given advice or directed to an appropriate service for their needs based on the information they provide to the NHS 111 call handler.
As part of the lead-up to the service launch in March 2013 the Trust held a series of stakeholder events at Trust Headquarters, Wakefield and the new NHS 111 call centre site in Wath-upon-Dearne, South Yorkshire. Over 150 stakeholders attended the events, including a mixture of GPs, commissioners and other healthcare professionals who took the opportunity to learn more about the new NHS 111 service and NHS Pathways. Positive feedback from the events included the following: Feel more informed to support the process. Very worthwhile event, learnt a lot from it. Excellent session. Excellent service. Looking forward to working with you all. Thank you. We will continue to work with our healthcare partners to gauge any impact of the new service on the wider health community and develop the service as further roll-out continues across the region. Foundation Trust Update In January our FT progress was marked by the successful scrutiny of our application by the Department of Health s Technical Committee. The next stage is a quality visit and review which is due to take place in the summer. During the last three months our Foundation Trust (FT) team has been busy recruiting Members, including a weeklong recruitment event at the White Rose Shopping Centre in Leeds, West Yorkshire. The team was joined by colleagues from the Trust to engage with the public and recruited over 950 new Members. The team has also been out and about recruiting in Hull city centre, St Stephen s and North Point Shopping Centres in Hull and Junction 32 Outlet Shopping Village, West Yorkshire. We now have a membership of over 4,800 (as of 8 April 2013). The public membership events have enabled members of the public to find out more about the Trust, meet our staff, register to become a Member and ask any questions about the services we provide. In addition, a series of successful first aid training courses has been run across the region for Members. More dates have now been arranged for additional courses to take place later in the year: North Yorkshire Wednesday 26 June 2013, 6.00pm - 8.30pm Rendezvous Hotel, Keighley Road, Skipton, BD23 2TA
Saturday 7 September 2013, 10.00am - 12.30pm Jennyfield Styan Community Centre, Grantley Drive, Harrogate, HG3 2XU Tuesday 3 December 2013, 1.00pm - 3.30pm Ripon Community House, Sharow View, Allhallowgate, Ripon, HG4 1LE South Yorkshire Wednesday 8 May 2013, 6.00pm - 8.30pm Mapplewell and Staincross Village Hall, Darton Lane, Mapplewell, Barnsley, S75 6AL Saturday 14 September 2013, 10.00am - 12.30pm Classroom 2, Unity Centre, St Leonard's Road, Rotherham, S65 1PD Wednesday 2 October 2013, 1.00pm - 3.30pm Sharrow Community Forum, Old Junior School, South View Road, Sheffield, S7 1DB West Yorkshire Thursday 13 May 2013, 6.00pm - 8.30pm Kirkstall and Fountains Meeting Room, Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust Headquarters, Springhill 2, Brindley Way, Wakefield 41 Business Park, Wakefield, WF2 0XQ Saturday 20 July 2013, 10.00am - 12.30pm Kirkstall and Fountains Meeting Room, Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust Headquarters, Springhill 2, Brindley Way, Wakefield 41 Business Park, Wakefield, WF2 0XQ Tuesday 8 October 2013, 1.00pm - 3.30pm Queen's Road Neighbourhood Centre, Queen's Road, Halifax, HX1 4NE East Yorkshire Thursday 13 June 2013, 5.15pm - 7.45pm The Bransholme Health Centre, Goodhart Road, Bransholme, Hull, HU7 4DW Saturday 28 September 2013, 10.00am - 12.30pm Peter Harrison Room, Beverley Minster Parish Centre, 38 Highgate, Beverley, HU17 0DN Thursday 5 December 2013, 1.00pm - 3.30pm Driffield Community Centre, Mill Street, Driffield, YO25 6TR If you are interested in attending one of these events please register your interest by email: foundationtrust@yas.nhs.uk or telephone: 01924 584567. In February we launched our first membership newsletter, Your Ambulance Service which provides Members with the latest news from the Trust and details about forthcoming membership events. The newsletter was sent to all of our Members and is also available to download from our website: http://www.yas.nhs.uk/foundationtrust/foundation_trust_document.html We will keep you posted of any further developments.
YAS Crew Delivers Baby in North Yorkshire During a bitterly cold and wintry January Paramedic David Brayshaw and Emergency Medical Technician Alf Pickering delivered baby Isabelle in the back of their ambulance en route to York Hospital. Mum Lisa Dobson had only just set off in the ambulance when she realised Isabelle was on her way. David called for Alf to stop the ambulance as he was going to have to deliver her there and then. Lisa was full of praise for our crew and said they were fantastic. After delivering baby Isabelle the crew took both mum and baby to the hospital where they were checked over and sent home hours later. This was not the first baby David had delivered during his career, after assisting at a home birth just before Christmas he is now into double figures. This is just another example of one of the many patients helped by our staff every day.