Update from CEO Anthony Marsh: 'sharing a vision' (25th September 2014)

When I took up post in January we all embarked on a journey; a journey of change, a journey of new beginnings, and a journey of huge scale. We’ve come a very long way, but sometimes despite the huge amounts of time, effort and hard work that goes into the day-to-day it can sometimes feel like we’re not making the progress as quickly as we want to.

We have set ourselves a challenge to be achieving our national targets in October.  This is an ambitious target and I know I am still asking a lot of people who are already going above and beyond. From today, we absolutely must meet our Red1, Red2 and A19 targets for the region as a whole. We all know what ‘good’ looks and feels like and we are so nearly there, but this is about all of us sharing that vision to achieve so we can provide a better and faster service to patients. For too long the service has been neglected and down-trodden.  We are in a much better place now.  More frontline staff, more emergency ambulances and newer fleet.  We have secured more than £20M of additional investment to help us improve the service to patients.  We need to demonstrate we have the passion, ambition and determination to deliver.

I hope to announce next week the full details of the pay bandings review which will reward frontline staff for all your hard work, for achieving the improvements and for sticking at it. 

I am exceptionally proud of the work you’ve already achieved.  We couldn’t have recruited hundreds of new staff, put new emergency ambulances on the road, responded to the increase in calls we’ve had and reinvested the millions worth of management savings we’ve made without incredible ambition and hard work. The fact that we’ve reached those goals shows that when we need to, we can pull out all the stops and achieve.

So I am asking all of you now to be even more innovative in the way we work. To focus every decision on whether it helps us achieve our six priorities and provides better care to patients. Without question, we have to meet our targets in October and provide a faster response to patients so they get the care they need when they need it – and you can all help us to realise that ambition in your own way. It’s about doing what’s right for ourselves, for the NHS and most importantly for our patients, and I absolutely believe that we can do this.

Please be assured you have my full support.

Let’s now show everyone else outside the ambulance service what we can achieve.

Anthony Marsh, Chief Executive

Published 25th September, 2014