Update from Dr Anthony Marsh - 29th May 2014

Chief Executive Dr Anthony Marsh

This week we received the news we’ve been hoping to hear – our commissioners have agreed to provide the necessary transitional funding to accelerate the much-needed improvements in the Trust to further improve patient care. This one-off investment will unlock many bottlenecks, including issues with the restructure and enable us to make real improvements to the work of our staff and the lives of our patients by giving us the financial support for more new and replacement emergency ambulances and equipment as well as our substantial recruitment and training plans.

As I’m sure you will appreciate there are some very real and serious expectations of the improvements we will be making as a result of this funding. Commissioners require a particularly high level of detail and planning for how exactly the money will be spent. All 19 clinical commissioning groups in our region have examined our business case and are contributing to the funding.

Therefore we should not underestimate the extra obligation we now have to deliver; quite rightly we are committed to giving better patient care and performance across our service.

I believe this extra funding has given us an opportunity to make EEAST the organisation we want it to be. We will be introducing the latest new equipment, including haemorrhage kits, the EZ-IO intraosseous infusion system and the Kendrick extraction device and we will have new emergency ambulances and equipment for bariatric and complex patients. This brings the Trust alongside other ambulance services in terms of the equipment we use. The funding also contributes to the future progression programmes for emergency care assistants and technicians and the training of our student paramedics.

The final piece in the jigsaw is the contribution this money makes to the restructure plans. In the last financial year the Trust made a number of redundancies which cost more than £2m and was funded by the reinvestment of performance penalties. With this extra money, we can complete the structure.

Our commissioners have shown faith in us that we can deliver better patient care by giving us such substantial means to do it; we cannot let them down but more importantly we must ensure we do not let our patients or ourselves down. We now have the best possible arrangements to improve – we need to be ambitious and ensure we deliver. Please be assured of my full support.

Published 29th May, 2014

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