Ise Vale Medical Services Ltd

Ise Vale Medical Services Ltd is an independent ambulance service located in Leeds, West Yorkshire. The service assesses and provides emergency medical treatment mainly to participating visitors and staff at public events. The service has three emergency ambulance vehicles to allow for the transfer of patients to hospital.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out a short noticed announced inspection on 25 January 2019.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we ask the same five questions of all services: are they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well-led? Where we have a legal duty to do so we rate services’ performance against each key question as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.

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

The main service provided by this service was emergency and urgent care through the provision of first aid and medical cover for events, which was not within our scope of registration. The service also transports patients from event sites to hospital in the event of a medical emergency which does fall under the scope of regulation.

Services we rate

Our rating of this service was Good overall.

We found the following areas of good practice:

• The stated aim of the service was that the patient always came first and staff were very caring in all aspects of their practice.
• Staff worked in a culture that was friendly and supportive.
• The service was planned in advance to meet the needs of visitors and participants at events.
• Patients could access the service in a timely and efficient manner with rapid on scene arrival times.
• The service had systems and processes in place to handle and respond to complaints.

• Leadership operated through direct and open communication with staff.

However, we identified some areas that the service provider needed to improve:

• No clear safeguarding lead or defined safeguarding procedure was in place. We found a lack of evidence of safeguarding training being completed both for staff and the safeguarding lead.
• The medicines management policy did not fully describe the provider’s intention to procure and administer patient group direction medicines in line with legislation and guidance.
• Paediatric monitoring equipment including basic life support equipment, paediatric defibrillation and paediatric safety restraints for use during patient journeys was deficient or absent from vehicles.
• Managing and controlling risks appropriately, for example those associated with cleanliness of vehicles and infection prevention and control.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it should make other improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. Details are at the end of the report.

Ellen Armistead

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals