More ambulance staff and vehicles for the Durham Dales
The North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) has boosted resources across the Durham Dales as part of a £650k project to bring the area in line with the rest of the North East.
NEAS has recruited six new emergency care assistants and invested in an additional rapid response vehicle to cover the Teesdale and Weardale area, with a further five new staff posts currently being advertised.
The new resources follow a review into the way ambulance services are delivered in the Durham Dales, which differ from the rest of the North East region. Changes introduced mean that ambulances are now crewed by a paramedic and emergency care assistant rather than two paramedics. As well as freeing up valuable paramedic resources which were being underutilised to drive vehicles, this ensures local communities are serviced in the same way as the rest of the region.
For Barnard Castle this brings the total number of resources covering the area to eight paramedics, eight emergency care assistants and two ambulance vehicles. Weardale now has eight paramedics, six emergency care assistants, one ambulance vehicle and one rapid response vehicle.
NEAS staff overtime rates have fallen dramatically by almost 70% as a result of the changes, helping reduce the workload and stress on staff.
NEAS Head of Emergency Care, Douglas McDougall, said: “Although it is still very early days, the initial results suggest our new system is working well.
“Extensive research undertaken before we went ahead showed that clinical standards would not be affected by any alteration in skill-set and this certainly appears to be the case. There is a chronic national shortage of paramedics and having double crewed ambulances which use a highly skilled paramedic to drive the vehicle simply didn’t make the best use of our resources. Although we are reducing the gap by recruitment and by nurturing and developing our student paramedics, we don’t expect to have our full quota of paramedics in place until April 2017.
“However our new rapid response vehicle and additional staff mean we are now better resourced than ever before in the Dales. We are now utilising these new resources to help deliver support to those local communities across Teesdale and Weardale. “
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Notes to editors
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North East Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (NEAS) covers 3,200 square miles across the North East region. It employs more than 2,500 staff and serves a population of 2.7 million people by handling all NHS 111 and 999 calls for the region, operating patient transport and ambulance response services, delivering training for communities and commercial audiences and providing medical support cover at events.
In 2014/15 the service answered 1.107 million emergency 999 and NHS 111 calls, responded to 302,687 incidents that resulted in a patient being taken to hospital, treated and discharged 18,144 patients with telephone advice and treated and discharged 81,990 patients at home. In the same year, emergency care crews reached 134,745 incidents within the national target of 8 minutes.