Health watchdog the independent Care Quality Commission has reported South Central Ambulance Service as "weak". Care Quality Commission have this year also produced a damning report on Boardmoor Hospital in Crowthorne details of which can be found here on Bracknell Blog.
In the 2008/09 report the ambulance service is shown to be one of the 3 worst in England. Last years report had our ambulance service as being good.
It should be point out that no ambulance service scored "excellent" in the report, two scored good, six fair and three weak.
The main failing on the report was the response time. The report showed the proportion of life-threatening calls not reached by South Central Ambulance service by 8 minutes, or after 19 minutes, was just too high. The report also showed the number of serious non life-threatening calls that it reached after the 19 minutes was higher then acceptable.
The worry for me is that in Bracknell, Crowthorne and Sandhurst we don’t have a hospital which is close for emergency care cover. So by the time the ambulance gets to the sick and injured it is even more important, as the jouney to the hospital is not a short one. Ambulances have very highly trained staff and first class life saving equipment. They have to treat the patient and then transport them as fast as possible to a hospital. These periods are so critical especially when our emergency facilities are so far away from the users.
Because of the continued reduction of services at Heatherwood, we lost our close emergency cover along time ago. I hope this will change one day but this look very unlikely for a long time to come see here.
Instead of the Labour and Tory parties arguing on who will spend the most money on the NHS, would it not be better if all all political parties just worked together on this, to find out why these problems happen. To assist in the provision of any extra ambulance services that is required. We all know there are savings to be made in the structure of the NHS, lets just slim that down and redirect the money, or is that just too simple?
The report can be found below;
http://2009ratings.cqc.org.uk/findcareservices/informationabouthealthcareservices/overallperformance/searchfororganisation.cfm?cit_id=RYE&widCall1=customWidgets.content_view_1
What do you expect from a bunch of ostriches.
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