Quality care for patients: new priorities for ambulance service

Friday, 27 June, 2014

 

The way the ambulance service will evolve the high quality of patient care has been set out in a new report.

The East of England Ambulance Trust NHS Trust (EEAST) Quality Account for 2013/14 is the first under Chief Executive Dr Anthony Marsh after coming into post in January and focuses on cardiac and stroke care, amongst others.

Under NHS regulations, all organisations publish quality accounts to set out clinical priorities for the coming year as well as reflecting on the past 12 months. For 2014/15, the Trust is focusing on seven key areas to raise quality standards, including stroke and heart attack care, timely response to patients, sepsis care, friends and family test, frequent callers, and cardiac arrest care.

Dr Marsh said: “We want patients to be seen promptly and to be treated to high clinical standards in order to recover quickly. In the past year, great strides were made in clinical improvements including wound closure training for paramedics, a clinical record viewer to support our Hear and Treat clinicians, and recognition of our dementia pathways as best practice.

“I’d like to thank our staff for their hard work and support in developing and enhancing the skills of our frontline staff, and we look forward to a year of achieving better high-quality care for patients.”

Tracy Nicholls, Acting Head of Clinical Governance, added: “The Quality Account enables our patients, the public and our stakeholders to measure our clinical focus and successes, and a great deal of work goes into it to ensure we’re identifying what it is our patients need from us in terms of care and good clinical practice. I’d like to thank the clinical teams for drawing together all this work and look forward to making more progress in the coming months for staff and patients.”

The Trust is currently recruiting 400 student paramedics to help improve performance, along with upskilling emergency care assistants and emergency medical technicians. More ambulances are also being put on the road in measures set out by its performance improvement plan.

The Quality Account can be viewed here: http://www.eastamb.nhs.uk/FOI%20Docs/EEAST%20Quality%20Account%202013-14.pdf

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