Ambulance service welcomes extra cash

A North East Ambulance chief has welcomed a cash boost for the life-saving service as it struggles with an increasing workload.

Helen Ray, chief executive of North East Ambulance Service (NEAS), says an injection of £55m into ambulance Trusts nationally is a “welcome boost” at an “incredibly busy” time.

The extra cash aims to boost to ambulance staff numbers ahead of winter by helping to recruit more 999 call handlers, crews and clinicians to work in control rooms.

It will also cover the recruitment and retention of liaison officers who manage the handover of patients between ambulances and hospitals.

Each service will decide locally how best to spend their allocation.

Ms Ray said: “This is a welcome boost to all the staff at NEAS. We’ve been incredibly busy over the last year and continue to have some of the fastest response times to life-threatened patients in the country.

"However, our responses to some patients who have not had an immediate threat to their life has not been to the standard we would want. This investment will help us to respond quicker to those patients and provide some relief to our staff, who have had a difficult year.”

NEAS answered 44,159 emergency999callslastmonth – an increase of 30% on June 2020 and nine per cent higher compared with June 2019.

Ambulances attended 33,987emergencieslastmonth compared with 31,821 in June 2019 – a seven per cent increase. NEAS also answered an average of more than 2,000 calls a day to NHS 111 last month.