World champions – NEAS at the forefront of trauma care for patients
The North East Ambulance Service are the world champions for trauma care.
A team from the Trust was crowned best in the world in a gruelling 10-hour exercise at the recent International Trauma Life Support (ITLS) annual conference in America.
Clinical educator David Stephenson, clinical operations manager Alan Potts, clinical care manager Ben Barber and HART paramedic Scott Jones were put through their paces with support from the Trust’s workforce lead Karen Gardner, beating off stiff competition from trauma teams from around the world, including Jordan, the Americas, Canada, Slovenia, Germany, Holland, Australia and Nigeria.
As the only UK representative and winners of this year’s competition, NEAS is also the first European team to win the competition in 30 years. The team had to deal with three trauma scenarios and were judged by an international panel of experts.
The Trust is a leader in International Trauma Life Support training for ambulance crews. ITLS was set up to improve the outcomes of patients with traumatic injuries by developing emergency care practices based on the best available evidence.
Head of workforce and development at NEAS Karen Gardner said:
“Working on an ambulance is all about working together effectively, so putting our skills and teamwork under a global spotlight, with specialist judges assessing us from all over the world, has both earned us the recognition that affirms our practices in the North East and given us enormous pride to work for our service.
“The team has worked particularly hard this year and their professionalism was a credit to the Trust.
“Most people join the ambulance service because they want to help people in an emergency and whilst trauma care isn’t all that we offer as a service, it’s often a part of the job that crews are keen to develop their skills in.
“We teach our own teams with the latest ITLS training and we also offer external training to others across the UK so we were both keen to represent our region and our country, and delighted to have brought home a great deal of learning from the latest developments.”
Notes to editors
For more information, contact the NEAS press office on 07559 918672 or email publicrelations@neas.nhs.uk
About the North East Ambulance Service
North East Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (NEAS) covers 3,200 square miles across the North East region. It employs more than 2,600 staff and serves a population of 2.7 million people by handling all NHS111 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 2018/19 we answered more than 1.4m emergency 999 and NHS 111 calls, with almost 290,000 patients taken to hospital, 21,500 treated and discharged over the phone and more than 100,000 treated and discharged at home. Almost 76,000 emergency incidents were reached within seven minutes and more than 570,000 Patient Transport Service journeys were made. Over the year we responded to almost 6,000 road traffic incidents. 6,300 people were trained in CPR and defibrillator awareness and 167 new community defibrillators were registered.