Private ambulances increasingly used to respond to 999 calls

Ambulance services are increasingly calling in private firms to respond to 999 calls in the latest sign that NHS care providers are struggling to cope with the sharply rising number of patients who need urgent medical attention.

The London ambulance service (LAS) has had the biggest increase among England’s 10 regional ambulance trusts. The amount it spent on private ambulance providers soared from £700,000 in 2011 to £10.1m last year, a thirteen-fold increase.

Cost of private ambulances

Many other NHS ambulance services are also spending more of their budgets on private firms because of their growing reliance on them to meet demand.

For example, the amount paid out by South East Coast ambulance service (Secamb), which covers Kent, Sussex and Surrey, rose from £5.8m in 2012 to £11.6m last year, though it spent even more than that, £14.5m, in 2014.

Similarly, Yorkshire ambulance service paid private services £1.85m in 2014-15 to respond to 10,862 incidents. Last year that jumped to to £7m for attending 38,821 incidents.

The number of calls for assistance in London to which private ambulances have responded rose from 5,024 in 2011 to 59,749 last year. The figure includes both 999 calls and non-urgent journeys to hospital or other medical appointments.

Number of private ambulance responses

The trend has sparked serious concern about the NHS’s chronic shortage of paramedics, which has coincided with big annual rises in emergency calls to all 10 ambulance services in England.

“Ambulance services are not something that should be flung out to the private sector,” said Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrats leader, who obtained the figures for London under a freedom of information request.

“We should not be offering this out to the lowest bidder. It’s not what people want or expect, and the NHS needs more paramedics.”

He said increasing demand was forcing NHS services to draft in private operators to ensure calls were answered on time. “Without the private providers we would currently not have enough resources to get to all the patients who need an ambulance.”

East Midlands ambulance service’s spending on private firms has also risen, up 15% from £4.47m in 2013-14 to £5.15m in 2015-16.

North West ambulance service used to pay only St John Ambulance and the British Red Cross to supplement its own services. But in 2014-15 it began using private providers for the first time, spending £998,741 on seven firms during that year, including QAS Ambulance (£244,365) and Trust Medical (£206,744).

Paul Woodrow, the director of operations at LAS, said: “We have seen a 45% increase in the number of life-threatening incidents in the last five years, responding to 504,685 category A incidents in 2015-16 compared with 347,659 in 2010-11. To continue providing a safe service to Londoners, we use three carefully selected providers in a similar way to hospitals employing agency nurses.”

Crews employed by all three providers “are appropriately trained at either paramedic or emergency medical technician level and carry the same equipment as our crews”, he said.

However, some NHS paramedics claim that private ambulance personnel are not always as well trained as them.

One Secamb paramedic said: “We as crews think they are not as well trained as us and we regularly have to travel with them and the patient to hospital because they cannot cope.

“They are good people but don’t have the same level of training as Secamb staff. This is not good for the patient as their skill set is well below ours. Often they call up asking for para backup, meaning they can’t manage that patient.”

LAS spending on private firms increased almost seven-fold inside one year, from £700,000 in 2011 to £4.8m in 2012, and then more than doubled inside the next 12 months to just under £10m in 2013. It fell slightly in 2014 to £9.2m but then rose to £12.2m in 2015, before falling to £10.1m last year.

Paul Evans, the director of the NHS Support Federation, a research group, said: “Ambulance services sit at the epicentre of the crisis in health and social care services and it’s not surprising they are struggling to cope with demand, but even so this is a shocking escalation in privatisation.

“Resorting to private providers is not the answer if we want to secure safe and effective emergency services. The evidence shows that they use fewer paramedics than NHS crews, which impacts upon patient safety as they will inevitably be sent to treat patients that they are not qualified for and leads to more situations where more experienced staff have to be sent to take over.”

Late last year Coperforma, a private transport firm, had to hand back the £63.5m contract it had held only since April for taking patients in Sussex to non-urgent hospital appointments after a series of blunders. Some of those involved cancer patients, and led MPs and others to describe its service as “a shambles”.

Evans said: “That shows that there are serious flaws in outsourcing theses vital services.”

Christina McAnea, the head of health at the Unison union, said: “Strained NHS finances have led to staffing shortages where shifts aren’t covered and ambulance services have no option but to call on private companies to fill the gaps.

“But the millions of pounds used hiring private ambulances would be better spent filling vacancies and holding on to those highly skilled staff who are leaving in droves.

“Ministers must accept that by continually slashing budgets they are forcing ambulance services into short-term solutions for urgent long-term problems. This helps no one.”

Private ambulances increasingly used to respond to 999 calls

FDA Slow to Respond to Fukushima Radiation, Get in touch with to Action four/10

The Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN) is urging the public to participate in a Nationwide Get in touch with in to Action Day this coming Thursday, April 10th by contacting their elected Representatives in demanding a rational, transparent, and binding degree for testing radiation in food.  This is in response to very current statements by the Meals and Drug Administration (FDA) that it sees no purpose “to alter consumption of specific foods imported from Japan or domestically developed meals like seafood..”

There is a Facebook page for Becquerel Awareness Day (“It’s B.A.D., because rads are bad to eat!”) with talking factors and more details.  It also links to an Event page the place people can RSVP and invite other people to join.  All that’s essential on April 10th is a phone to let DC know we’re demanding that FDA act responsibly in the ongoing wake of Fukushima.  FFAN will also be making use of other social media for this occasion and welcomes your participation. Please click here https://www.facebook.com/RADSrBAD2EAT

Becquerel Awareness Day’s National Call in to Action is in response to FDA’s actions as outlined in this press release:   Washington, April 3, 2014 ~ The Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN) responded to statements by the Meals and Drug Administration (FDA) that the company is not advising people “to alter their consumption of specific food items imported from Japan or domestically developed food like seafood…” in the wake of the ongoing radioactive releases at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy station.  The Nationwide Academy of Sciences has stated that there is no safe dose of radiation, as a result FFAN rejects the current large ranges that FDA recommends for foods.

FFAN coalition member groups Beyond Nuclear, Citizens for Wellness and Ecological Alternatives Network filed a legal Citizen Petition with the FDA on March twelve, 2013 to decrease the volume of radioactive cesium permitted in food. The FDA’s only direct response to FFAN’s Citizen Petition is a letter dated June of 2013 stating they demand more time to reply.

Meanwhile Tokyo Electric and Power Co (TEPCO) has admitted to dumping at minimal 300 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific ocean daily, adding to the Pacific Ocean burden and that of its fish.  Bluefin tuna caught off San Diego in an August 2012 study demonstrated elevated quantities of Cesium 134 and 137, which are regarded characteristic isotopic markers for Fukushima radiation. The American Healthcare Association (AMA) resolution has referred to as on the U.S. government to check all U.S. seafood for radiation due to Fukushima and fully report the outcomes to the public. In addition, scientists from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography have discovered amounts of cesium in seawater off the Vancouver Canada coast that can be attributed to the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. The levels are at present lower, but the presence of cesium 134 confirms the contamination to be from Fukushima Daiichi.

“If the FDA needs to claim seafood is secure, then they need to have to institute a a lot more robust foods testing process. Taking into consideration the continued dumping of Fukushima radiation into the Pacific, we want to constantly check our seafood due to the fact the contamination amounts we see nowadays could undoubtedly change. This catastrophe and its affect on seafood will not be above for a quite long time,” stated Cindy Folkers of Past Nuclear.

Three years following the nuclear catastrophe began in Japan on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, FDA has not authorized a rational, transparent, and binding restrict for radiation in meals. As an alternative, they advise at minimum 1,200 Becquerels per kilogram of Cesium 134 and 137, the highest allowable amounts for radiation in foods in the world. The FDA’s restrict is twelve occasions greater than Japan’s that means that, in addition to seafood, other food and drinks deemed far also harmful for consumption there can be exported to U.S. citizens, such as vulnerable youngsters and pregnant ladies.   FFAN’s petition seeks to substantially decrease the present allowable levels of radiation in all food, including seafood to 5 Bq/kg, practically identical to the limits proposed by the Worldwide Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) in Germany and the EU.

“Why does FDA feel it is okay to expose youngsters in the us to twelve instances far more radioactive poison than young children in Japan? Even Japan’s limits are not protective enough. If this is the standard FDA makes use of to decide what is secure, then our young children are in danger,” stated Folkers, incorporating “Without a accountable contamination limit set, the FDA will doom a specific number of folks to pointless ailment, notably kids who are significantly far more vulnerable to radiation.”
Right after the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded in 1986, children in Belarus were identified to have heart and hormonal issues with approximately 1% of the existing U.S. limit for radioactive Cesium in their bodies. Substantial locations in the EU continue to be off limits to cattle and sheep manufacturing 28 many years soon after Chernobyl due to its influence on the environment and meals supply.

“The outsourcing of testing to other countries meals packages and a lack of transparency in FDA’s personal testing has left consumers flying blind when it comes to creating individual choices about meals safety,” says Nancy Foust of SimplyInfo.org.  “The recent FDA intervention level for radiation in foods is far as well higher and does not consider all the investigation on overall health consequences.”

The AMA joins FFAN in demanding the public’s ‘Right to Know’ relating to radiation ranges in food.  The two want a national database and transparent seafood testing, and FFAN invites other individuals to join in demanding that FDA minimize the volume of radiation permitted in our foods in a transparent and accountable method.

 

FDA Slow to Respond to Fukushima Radiation, Get in touch with to Action four/10