Archived: Ambuline Nottinghamshire

Updated 29 November 2017

Ambuline Nottinghamshire is operated by Ambuline Limited, which is a subsidiary of Arriva Transport Solutions Ltd, a nationwide provider of independent, non-emergency patient transport services. Arriva

Transport Solutions Ltd is part of an international transport group Deutsche Bahn (DB). The service was commissioned in 2012 to provide non-emergency patient transport to the communities of Nottinghamshire and Sheffield in South Yorkshire. The Sheffield contract is no longer active and the Nottinghamshire contract has been renewed for a further two years. The aims and objectives of Arriva Transport Solutions Ltd are to provide private ambulance services for non-emergency patient transport on behalf of the NHS. The journey types and categories of patient they transport include; outpatient appointments, hospital discharges, hospital admissions, hospital transfers, renal, oncology, palliative care, intermediate care, mental health, paediatric, bariatric (patients over a certain weight).

The service had a registered manager since 2012. However, at the time of the inspection, a new manager was in the process of being appointed.

Updated 29 November 2017

Ambuline Nottinghamshire is operated by Ambuline Limited, which is a subsidiary of Arriva Transport Solutions Ltd. The service provides a patient transport service. Ambuline Nottinghamshire provides a non-emergency patient transport service (PTS) in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

We inspected patient transport services (PTS) using our comprehensive inspection methodology, in March 2017 which resulted in enforcement being taken against the provider for two regulations of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activity) Regulations 2014. These were:

• Regulation 13 Safeguarding service users from abuse and improper treatment

• Regulation 17 Good governance

The full report of this inspection can be found on the CQC website:

https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/1-425787954.

As a result of our findings we issued a warning notice served under Section 29 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 in June 2017.

In order to follow up on progress against this warning notice we carried out a short notice announced focused inspection on 5 October 2017.

At this inspection we visited Ashville and Quorn Road ambulance stations at Nottingham. We spoke with 12 members of staff including managers, control staff and PTS drivers.

As this inspection was a focused inspection, we looked at the safe and well-led domains only.

Services we do not rate

We regulate independent ambulance services but we do not currently have a legal duty to rate them. We highlight good practice and issues that service providers need to improve and take regulatory action as necessary.

We found the provider had met the requirements of the warning notice but there were still some areas that required further improvement:

• The supervisors, control patient transport drivers had not had updated adult and childrens safeguarding level two training as recommended in national guidance.

• Information was not provided in all ambulance vehicles to assist in making safeguarding referrals.

• Ambulance staff had no computer access to current policies stored on the web based portal.

However we also found the following areas of good practice:

• Senior managers and supervisors had undertaken incident management training and were able to identify, investigate and review themes in order to fully address incidents within specific timelines.

• A 24 hour, seven day a week incident reporting telephone number had been provided to all staff.

• A quality bulletin was available for all staff to read highlighting incidents and learning points identified.

• Management staff had received updated training in line with safeguarding level three as recommended inNational guidance from the Intercollegiate Document for Healthcare Staff (2016)

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it must take some actions to comply with the regulations and that it should make other improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. We also issued the provider with one requirement notice that affected patient transport services. Details are at the end of the report.

Heidi Smoult

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (Central), on behalf of the Chief Inspector of Hospitals

Updated 29 November 2017

We have not rated this service because we do not currently have a legal duty to rate this type of service or the regulated activities which it provides.