Trust moves to Business Continuity Status

We have seen a further significant pressure on our service – resulting from both a sustained increase in demand, acuity of patients and significant handover delays at our hospitals. It is of little comfort, but this situation is currently being experienced across all ambulance services in England.

To respond to this, we made the decision on Tuesday to escalate the Trust to a critical business continuity incident, to allow us to take further risk assessed actions to manage this pressure which have included:

• Further increasing the number of remote clinicians to support EOC to maximise levels of Hear & Treat and the use of alternative care pathways.
• Making changes to some of the calls we would normally auto-dispatch to, where further clinical assessment would be appropriate.
• Requesting mass rapid release of ambulances waiting at hospital at peak points to return ambulance availability.
• Pushing to increase access to the stack time to give greater opportunity for community services to pick up calls where this is clinically appropriate.

This pressure is felt by us all differently, whether it is the volume and the risk carried by our people working in EOCs or seeing first-hand the impact of delayed responses to patients and the frustration of waiting for extended periods at hospitals for colleagues who are working on the road, and the resulting pressure on our colleagues in operational support and other support services, to name a few. However, it does impact us all. 

At times like this there is a real and understandable risk that this pressure and stress pushes us to withdraw. However, we all know that we are at our very best when we work together as one team and I hope and believe we can hold onto that despite these challenges. I never cease to be amazed by your dedication and commitment to doing the very best you can for our patients and our communities, and this is something I hope you are rightly proud about.

So please do continue to support each other, and please make use of the wellbeing support we have available. We share this link a lot, but it’s important that everyone within EEAST knows how and where to find this additional support should they need it. 

Published 20th December 2022