Region's ambulance service faces shake-up (From The Northern Echo)

North-East Ambulance Service to reclassify vehicles

8:50am Thursday 2nd February 2012 in Durham By Barry Nelson, Health Editor

THE region’s biggest ambulance service is facing a major organisational shake-up.

The North-East Ambulance Service (NEAS) – which covers an area from Berwick in the Scottish Borders to Brotton in East Cleveland – wants to reclassify ambulances into three categories.

The categories would be emergency vehicles (doublecrew paramedic ambulances and emergency rapid response cars), urgent care vehicles and patient transport vehicles, which would be distributed around the region according to the demand for each type of service.

The controversial changes will mean some towns – such as Bishop Auckland – will lose at least one 999 ambulance and two rapid response cars, but gain extra urgent care ambulances.

Currently, Bishop Auckland has three double-crew paramedic ambulances, three rapid response cars and three urgent care ambulances.

Similarly, Durham City would go from having two double-crew paramedic ambulances and no urgent care ambulance to one double-crew paramedic ambulance, one urgent care ambulance and a rapid response car.

The NEAS decided to create a new urgent care category to attend non-emergency calls where it is known that paramedic skills will not be needed.

This will allow double-crew paramedic ambulances to concentrate on emergency calls.

Ambulance bosses have stressed that no ambulance stations will close but some may have to move.

Mark Cotton, assistant director of communications with the NEAS, said: “We deal with 360,000 emergency calls a year.

“We can plot where demand is falling and growing. Demand has continued to rise and we need to review where our ambulances are based and the resources that we have in each location and try to match what we have with the demand.”

Mr Cotton said while the changes would result in the overall County Durham ambulance fleet reducing by three vehicles, staff numbers would go up from 237 to 257 and more hours would be worked by ambulance crews.

Mr Cotton said the total number of staff working in the NEAS accident and emergency service should increase from the current 979 to 1,046 by the time the changes are completed in April next year.

The NEAS is to adopt a new target that every emergency call should be attended by a paramedic.