Update from Anthony Marsh - 19th June 2014

On Tuesday I held a meeting in Newmarket for all Trust managers to discuss the progress we have made and the immediate future, at what is an important point of the Trust’s transformation.

We have achieved a lot already and the feedback on what has been done so far was very positive; we have 147 new emergency ambulances on our roads, we have made offers to more than 200 student paramedics and 100 are currently being trained so we are on target to have recruited all 400 SAPs by November, we have more frontline staff treating patients following the end of secondments and we will be using some of our additional funding from our commissioners to purchase new medical equipment. A lot of hard work has been put in during a short space of time and I thank everyone involved for their efforts – well done.

However the restructure still needs concluding and was a much larger issue to inherit than I originally anticipated, but I am now very clear on what needs to happen and we will complete the operations structure in July. In terms of the corporate restructure, we will not be going ahead with previous proposals. Over the next six weeks we will be reviewing our corporate and support services, removing vacant and other posts that we no longer need and making incremental changes on an individual basis.

Another important thing I did talk through on Tuesday was how the restructure cannot distract us from providing a good service for patients. At the moment we are not getting to patients quickly enough and we must make improvements to meet our Red 1, Red 2 and A19 targets. We’ve been given c.£20m to help make improvements so we need to turn this around in the next couple of months - I expect us to achieve our targets in September. We are the only people who can make the changes and improvements happen, nobody else is going to do it for us. We need to be ambitious, support each other and our staff to be the best they can be.

The additional funding from our commissioners is a huge pledge of support and we now have a fantastic opportunity to deliver the service you have wanted to deliver for years. We all need to do our bit to help the organisation improve and all get behind improving our performance. I know how passionate you are about our service and I know you will do everything possible to help us get to where we need to be for our patients. You have my full support to make the necessary improvements.