“Looking at the detail of the report for WAHT, the trust was scored in the bottom 1.8% of all acute trusts in two key aspects of patient safety - incident reporting and learning as well as clinical supervision. This reflects our family's experience of Weston General.
Our experience of the ambulance service was first class.”

“What to say, I actually work within the trusts mentioned and also have the pleasure of occasionally working alongside the GWAS crews and I have to say that all of the frontline staff responding to emergencies and working in the hospital wards/departments do an amazing job and often in bizzare and extreme circumstances.

The problem I hate to say is on the administrative side, both at a local and government level. For example, the door to hospital time is impieded by the use of rapid respoders. Whilst they do an amazing job, arrive quickly and are normally higly skilled and experienced this has come at the cost of longer waits for a full ambulance crew to then transport to hospital. Whilst this satisfies the managers need to meet the governments 8 min call to scene responce time this does not get the patient transported to specialist care any quicker.
This also ticks the managers financial box as it costs less to have a one man car crew than it does to have a two man ambulance saving in labour and asset aquirement. (Good management ey, Government say yey, I say nay!)

Within the hospital trust's another classic example of good/bad management is the government's 4 hour A&E turn around. Do you really always get seen in that time?

The consept seems great, everyone hates waiting around particularly when in pain and frightend. The fact is that there is no more resources to achieve this so it must be acomplised in some other manner. The solution across most of the country has been to utilise Clinical Descision units (CDU) often built into exisiting A&E units. If you are approaching the 4 hours and the clinicians are not sure what you (ie further tests, admission to hospital or a referal to another service such as social or psychiatric) then you will be moved into CDU. Seen and out of A&E in 4 hours, Management/government say yes, I say, not always what the numbers suggest!

This pressure obviously has a knock on effect as there is occasionally a pressure to discharge patients quickly to free up more beds to take the load off A&E/CDU. Whilst this has only in EXTREMELY RARE cases proven to be unsafe there are many where patients do not feel psychologically or emotionally ready to leave. This sadly has no impact on the government statistics and targets sheet.

I was present during one of the QCC inspections who criticised the department I was working in that day exclaiming how chaotic the enviroment was and how disorganised it seemed and I could agree. It was an increadably busy day with lots of very sick people, many needing the attention of three or more professionals so yes it will appear chaotic with that many people, the main issue I hold is not one of the inspectors actually bothered to ask any staff what was actually happening!

I wonder what the next great policy will be and how many new managerial and private consultants will be required to action it!

If only they'd stop wasting time & money and actually ask the patients and clinicians (the people who are directly affected by this) what they really need and how to make it work!”

“its not always the ambulance services fault, what about the time wasters who call an ambulance for no good reasons.”

“It is unfortunate that these statistics do not always reflect the truth regarding the patients' experience. As someone involved in Paramedic Education and Training, I know that ambulance service paramedics are amongst the best in the world and are continually striving for new techniques and best practice in clinical care. Also, through family illnesses, I have been an occasional user of the ambulance service and they have always been quick, caring and efficient; all that you need at a difficult time.”

“No complaints about the Ambulance service and paramdeics from me. Think the do an amazing job under very hard circumstances.”

“Oh dear BEP....

You seem to have forgotten to publish the overall rating for GWAS!

Was this an intentional mistake so you could carry out your usual round of ambulance bashing?”

“I see that yet again BEP is on an Ambulance Service bash to sensationalise a story.

I notice from the story that there is NO MENTION of overall ranking, services or finances for GWAS unlike the other trusts featured in the story!

Surely it can't be that hard for BEP to report a story correctly.”

“Nothing but praise for Ambulance Crews,salt of the earth.”

“"GWAS chairman Tony FitzSimons said: "Last year was a time of great change. Many changes in the second half of the year are now resulting in faster response times and other improvements."

He means the new computer dispatch system, which went live Sep 09 and still to this day has "issues".

The interim chief executive, Anthony Marsh, said if he could have, he would have postponed/delayed the new system - alas, he came in too late....”

“I've only seen two callouts in the last year. In the first, a car crash, the ambulance were there in 5 minutes, the police took 15-20 as they were busy with the usual friday night stuff. The other, a bike under a lorry, we had paramedics and ambulance within 3 minutes”