Archived: Prometheus Safe & Secure Ltd

Updated 21 April 2017

Prometheus Safe & Secure is operated by Prometheus Safe & Secure Ltd.

The service opened in 2014. It is an independent ambulance service based in Newport, Shropshire although is in the process of registering a new base in Erdington, Birmingham. The service is available 24 hours per day, every day of the year.

Although registered as a patient transport service; patients carried by the service were physically well which means that vehicles were not equipped in the same way that conventional ambulances might be.

The service provides secure mental health patient transport across the United Kingdom for both adults and children. The service initially worked with hospital trusts within the Birmingham area; transferring patients between wards within the trusts. However, Prometheus Safe & Secure Ltd now provides patient transport services to a number of NHS trusts and private providers across England, Scotland and Wales. The types of transport provided includes transfers from secure mental health services to prison or courts, transfers from mental health inpatient units to general acute settings for medical care, transport from patients’ home addresses to a mental health inpatient setting, and transfers for patients using community adult mental health services and learning disability services.

The service has had a registered manager in post since 2014; this individual also became the Managing Director of the provider in 2014.

We inspected this service on 19 January 2017. This was the first time that CQC have inspected this service.

Updated 21 April 2017

Prometheus Safe & Secure Ltd is operated by a company of the same name; Prometheus Safe & Secure Ltd. The service provides a patient transport service specifically for patients requiring transfer to or from a secure mental health unit. We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out the inspection visit on 19 January 2017.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we ask the same five questions of all services: were they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well-led?

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

Services we do not rate

We regulate independent ambulance services but we do not currently have a legal duty to rate them. We highlight good practice and issues that service providers need to improve and take regulatory action as necessary.

We found the following areas of good practice:

• Staff within the service had an excellent awareness of how to report incidents; we saw evidence and examples of incident reporting and learning from incidents.
• The service had enough skilled staff to safely carry out the booked patient transfers. The service ensured a minimum of three staff were allocated to each patient transfer depending on risk and need.
• The service employed competent staff and ensured all staff were trained appropriately to undertake their roles. Staff had a good understanding of the Mental Health Act (1983) and were aware of their restrictions under this legal framework.
• We saw that staff were caring and respectful of patients using the service. Staff treated patients with confidentiality and dignity and sought to gain feedback from patients regarding their journey using a patient experience form.
• The service demonstrated the effort made to meet individual needs of patients using the service; such as considering the gender mix of transport staff and requesting staff that spoke a specific second language to provide translation services if needed.
• Staff told us, and we saw, that the leadership of the service was open, approachable and inclusive.

However, we also found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve:

The service should:

• Ensure all staff, including those on zero hour contracts are updating their knowledge of changes to policies and procedures. We saw that staff were informed of updates and changes to policies and procedures via text message and were able to attend the office to further familiarise themselves with these. However we were not assured all contracted staff were attending to familiarise themselves with the new and updated policies.

Ellen Armistead

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals