16. Submissions on Behalf of the Independent Ambulance Association by Mr Jory KC

Mr Jory: Well, I understood they were saving the best to last, so I’m not offended, thank you. That’s what I like to think, anyway.

My Lady, briefly, I can address you briefly in terms of our representations. I represent or act on behalf of the Independent Ambulance Association. We’ve made written submissions, which you will have. I’m going to refer to the IAA, rather than the longer term. I confine my brief submissions to the provisional list of issues.

Now, I’m aware that not many people know or perhaps have heard of the IAA. It is a not for profit trade association which represents independent ambulance providers across the UK. They are regulated by the Care Quality Commission. There are currently 50 member organisations within the IAA. They range from small companies, some with fewer than ten employees, some employing over 500 staff.

Now, each year the NHS funds the transport of between 11 to 12 million patients. More than half of all those patients – patient transfers are provided by independent ambulance providers.

So, just to repeat, more than half of all NHS patient transfers are provided by independent ambulance providers.

Now, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the NHS’s reliance on those independent ambulance providers increased dramatically. There was a significant and wholly unforeseen increase in demand for non-emergency transport service providers to pivot to prioritise Covid patients and emergency services. As a consequence of this, the IAA members have gained extensive first-hand experience of the impact of Covid-19 on patients and staff, and the many issues this presented.

My Lady, we’ve provided you with a written document. Can I just highlight, please, the two discrete areas we wish to draw your attention to, and I’m going to paragraph 6 of our submissions. We invite the Inquiry team to consider the following amendments to the provisional list of issues.

If you go to issue or provisional issue 4A, we make a suggestion:

“We suggest that either issue 4A3 be extended or a further subheading be added to consider systems in place, to address variations in demand for ambulances, including for non-emergency patient transport services.”

The reason we suggest this is that one of the main concerns identified by our many thousands of members is the lack of a comprehensive and clear line of communication between stakeholders in advance of significant changes in demand, and that resulted in uncertainty among our members and a simple inability to adjust and adapt effectively.

One suggestion put forward by our group is the introduction of a permanent national team within the NHS to provide oversight and leadership for non-emergency patient transfer services, and we believe that would go some way to providing a remedy for that particular problem.

The second recommendation or suggestion we advance at this stage is to consider a further subheading under issue 4A, namely classification and clarification of key worker status for ambulance/healthcare employees.

Now, what we’ve found from our discussions with our members is that many of the members faced difficulties arising from the ambiguity in the application of key worker status and the delay in clarification or extension of that category.

There was a perception the government was slow and possibly reluctant to assign key worker status to non-NHS staff, and that put, frankly, staff employed by IAA members in a very difficult position, because on the one hand they were keen to work to combat the early impact of the pandemic, but they were disadvantaged in terms of accessing the vaccines, PPE, testing and priority shopping, as well as facing a dilemma in making personal choices about what legally they could do, and that inevitably occupied the time and minds of staff who should have been and wanted to be focusing on providing support to healthcare services at an important and worrying time.

So, in summary, at this stage, my Lady, those are my brief submissions.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed for your help, and apologies again that you’ve waited so long.

Ms Carey, any remarks by way of reply?