West Midlands Ambulance Service fined £2.6 million over missed targets

The NHS in North Staffordshire has pocketed nearly £100,000 of a fine imposed for ambulance delays in other parts of the West Midlands.

The cash is part of £2.6million penalty on the region’s ambulance trust for failing to get to life-threatening calls quickly enough.

Over the whole of the West Midlands it missed a Government directive to reach 75 percent of 999s within eight minutes over the past year.

And even though it hit the target in North Staffordshire, £94,000 still comes to the area.

That is in recognition that ambulances could have been taken out of the county to cope with the hold-ups which built up in Birmingham districts.

Some will be paid back to improve ambulance response times with the rest available to spend on patient care by North Staffordshire’s two clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) which control NHS budgets.

Union leaders branded it “a farce” that money was being taken from a service already struggling to meet demand.

Latest figures show that despite the failings elsewhere, ambulances reached 76.5 percent of North Staffordshire emergencies within eight minutes last month to bring the average for the year to 81.1 percent.

CCGs’ finance director Tony Matthews said: “The delays are linked to the longer periods it was taking for ambulances to drop patients off at Birmingham hospitals and get back on the road again.

“In fact, at our own University Hospital of North Staffordshire, these turnaround times are among the shortest in the country.”

The service will lose £800,000 of the total fine because the remaining £1.8million will be reinvested to improve ambulance response times.

Leaders at West Midlands Ambulance Service(WMAS) say it has experienced unprecedented and unpredictable demand.

A spokesman said: “We were fined for failing to reach the Red 2 performance standard by just over one percent. To put this into perspective, we missed the target by, on average, only 12 seconds.

“There was no impact on patients from the levying of the fine as the trust board agreed to fund the £800,000 from reserves so that patient care was protected.

“We are currently exceeding all performance standards for 2014-15.”

The fine was technically imposed by Sandwell CCG which leads ambulance commissioning on behalf of all 17 groups in the West Midlands.

Ray Salmon, regional organiser for Unison ambulance union, said: “This is a farce. You cannot have 17 decisions made locally about an ambulance service which operates across the whole region.”

Ian Syme, co-ordinator of NHS campaigning group North Staffordshire Healthwatch, said: “Even though the problems appear to have been in Birmingham, ambulances may have been sent from Staffordshire to cover and that could have had a knock-on effect for UHNS.”

This article is courtesy from Stoke Sentinel.