Update from Anthony Marsh - 7th August 2014

I’m pleased to share the news with you this week that Health Education East have confirmed £4.2million of funding for our training and education plans, as part of the turnaround of the Trust. This money is going directly into our emergency care assistant to technician courses, our technician to paramedic courses and the student paramedic programme. It is a considerable amount of money, far higher than previous allocations and is not going to be given to us every year, so we will use it to recruit and train more paramedics and get closer to my ambition of having a paramedic on every ambulance and response car.

Our recruitment plans are also on schedule and we are getting closer to making our 400^th student paramedic contract offer, with 367 conditional offers already made. We currently have 64 people on courses, 32 of these people on driver training and 61 student paramedics on the road to date. This will really make a difference by the end of this year to support you on the frontline and improve our care to patients.

Tomorrow our first healthcare referral tier (HCRT) staff will finish their training course in Cambourne and I would like to extend my congratulations to all of you. You are our pioneers of this exciting new part of our service and will make a huge difference to how we deal with urgent calls, by freeing up emergency crews to respond to 999 cases. I hope you enjoy your new role and I look forward to seeing you on the road soon.

And as a last point, please remember to nominate your colleagues for the annual outstanding service awards, run by the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives – you need to make your nominations by 28^th September and I hope to see many winners from EEAST at the awards dinner in November.

Published 7th August 2014