Staff shake-up at ambulance service

A shake-up of senior staff has started at the region's ambulance service in a bid to improve performance. Director of operations Oskan Edwardson left the East of England Ambulance Trust this week for a secondment at the Department of Health.

A shake-up of senior staff has started at the region's ambulance service in a bid to improve performance.

Director of operations Oskan Edwardson left the East of England Ambulance Trust this week for a secondment at the Department of Health. Although the placement is for three months, it is not certain whether he will be returning.

Two so-called locality manager posts have also been abolished. The Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire locality manager, Judi Ingram, has become interim assistant director for A&E strategy and implementation. Her new role sees her tasked with ironing out some of the problems the trust still faces more than two years after the East Anglian Ambulance Service became part of the East of England Ambulance Service.

More senior staff changes are planned which may see senior management having to reapply for jobs. The new structure is due to be in place by the end of March and affects the top level below the board.

Mr Edwardson has become national ambulance lead for pandemic flu planning at the Department of Health. In his absence chief executive Hayden Newton will oversee operations, while Neil Storey, whose post as interim locality manager for Essex, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire has disappeared, becomes interim assistant director of A&E services.

It has been a difficult year for the service, which like other ambulance services faces challenging targets for the time taken to reach patients, which are now measured from when calls are answered rather than when the ambulance is dispatched. The Healthcare Commission ratings published in the autumn gave the trust a poor rating for both finances and performance.

Human resources director Seamus Elliott said: “We have got issues we have got to deal with on a whole-trust basis. We have still got three control rooms. It has taken some time and we have still never completed getting everything on to the same type of system. At the moment because of the pressure on services, everybody has their focus on what is going on right now, and now we need to be addressing those issues.”

He said the new management structure was because “we have had a set of interim appointments in place for nearly a year. That is not a good place to be.”