1 South Central Ambulance Trust – Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Oxfordshire
The Care Quality Commission will be inspecting this service from 8 September 2014. The inspection will look at:
- Care for people who are in life threatening circumstances using an emergency ambulance
- Patient transport services
The inspection team is interested in the experiences of people who have had to use an ambulance in an emergency as well as people who use an ambulance to get to a clinic etc, and may do so regularly. For an ambulance trust this includes the experience from:
- first making a call for an ambulance
- the response
- the care provided on the phone and getting on and off an ambulance
- what happens on the ambulance
People’s experiences of whether the ambulance services are ‘joined up’ with other services (particularly hospitals) is also important to the inspection team. The inspection team is also keen to hear evidence from local voluntary and community groups about the quality and safety of care that their members and service users have experienced.
You can send reports, peoples stories of care or other evidence your group holds about people’s care to hospitalinspections@cqc.org.uk or you can ring CQC on 03000 616161. Please put the name of the trust you are sending information about in the title of the email to ensure it is passed to the right inspection team.
2 Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust PLACE assessments 2014
Each year hospitals must carry out Patient Led Assessment of the Clinical Environment (PLACE) ad these take place in April/May. This is a national initiative resulting in a formal publication of the results. To do this, volunteers are required to carry out the assessment alongside NHS staff Some training is required which takes a couple of hours and this is run in various locations across the county. Once trained, volunteers are notified of the assessment dates for each of the county’s hospitals and you can then volunteer to take part if the dates are not convenient. If you would like to find out more please contact Tracey Underhill directly on 01494 734405 to register your interest