The East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust (EEAST) is an NHS trust responsible for providing National Health Service (NHS) ambulance services in the counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, in the East of England region. These consist of approximately 6.2million people across an area of .
It is one of ten ambulance services trusts providing England with emergency medical services, and is part of the NHS, receiving direct government funding for its role.
As well as providing an emergency ambulance service, the trust also provides non emergency patient transport services, commercial services and special operations such as emergency planning, and hazardous materials incident response. The service also support a number of emergency charities, such as air ambulances, who provide doctors for serious incidents.
The trust controls the mobilisation of critical care charities throughout its area. These include Magpas (HEMS), Essex & Herts Air Ambulance (HEMS), East Anglian Air Ambulance (HEMS), BASICS Essex Accident Rescue Service (BEARS), Suffolk Accident Rescue Service (SARS), Norfolk Accident Rescue Service (NARS), BASICS Hertfordshire, and the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Critical Care Service (BHECCS). The service can also, if required, mobilise London's Air Ambulance and even the Kent, Surrey and Sussex Air Ambulance if there is a major incident requiring more than one critical care team, and where other teams in the region are operating at maximum capacity. The trauma teams are dispatched by a critical care paramedic and dispatcher at the critical care desk, housed in the Tactical Operations Centre based at Chelmsford AOC, who filter through every call the ambulance service receives, interrogates it and makes a clinical decision on whether to dispatch a critical care resource.
History
The trust was formed on 1 July 2006 following the three-way merger of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust, the East Anglian Ambulance NHS Trust and the Essex Ambulance Service NHS Trust. The result was a service covering an area of with a population of 6.2million people, and one which answers around one million emergency calls per year.
The East Anglian Ambulance NHS Trust had been formed in 1994 from the three-way merger of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk Ambulance Services.
In 2009, the trust was censured by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) after inspection of an ambulance depot and seven of its 100 ambulance stations found patient-carrying vehicles were "dirty" and that staff were "unsure of basic measures for infection prevention and control". The service launched an "urgent and comprehensive review" of its ambulance cleaning programme and reiterated its stance on patient safety, adding that "ensuring consistent high standards of cleanliness is a challenge" with so many stations, covering six counties and an area of 7,500square-miles.
Statistics and resources
In 2015/16, the trust received 1,037,119 emergency calls and handled 500,620 non-emergency patient transport journeys. The trust arrived at 73.6% of emergency Red 1 calls within eight minutes, and 69.4% of emergency Red 2 calls within eight minutes.
EEAST employs more than 4,000 staff and has around 1,500 volunteers.
, the trust has the following resources in operation: 357 front-line emergency ambulances 201 marked rapid-response vehicles (RRV) 164 non-emergency ambulances (patient transport service - PTS) 52 major incident support vehicles (HART/major incident/resilience vehicles) Over 130 ambulance stations and response posts 3 ambulance operations centers (AOC - control rooms) in Bedford, Chelmsford and Norwich 4 training centres in Chelmsford, Welwyn Garden City, Newmarket and Norwich
The trust has its own emergency driving school, which trains drivers in 999 emergency driving under blue lights and sirens.
Stations and response posts
EEAST has 90 stations spread across the six counties the trust covers. Each station can house a mixture of accident and emergency vehicles, RRVs and patient transport services vehicles. The station has facilities for staff to rest, prepare ambulances and restock consumable medical equipment. Some of the larger stations are known as make ready stations or hub stations which house a team of make ready operatives who clean, fuel, restock, maintain and care for frontline accident and emergency ambulances. The larger stations also have the ability to house the resistance teams, which comprise Class C or C1 vehicles laden with equipment for response to major incidents.