As the East of England Ambulance Service UNISON Branch Chair, sitting in the most recent health and overview scrutiny committee was the most distressing and upsetting thing that I have done in the 40 years of being in this service.
East of England Ambulance Trust Chair, Mrunal Sisodia and Trust CEO Neil Moloney were so casual and dismissively talking about making over 100 staff redundancy was heartbreaking especially with some of them sat in the room listening.
Read: Ambulance Trust chair defends closure of Bedford’s Emergency Operations Centre
Moloney cited the raising call volumes and the Trust’s “inefficiency” in running the three separate Ambulance Operations Centres in Bedford, Chelmsford, and in Norwich.
But given the geographic size of our Trust, other Trusts that are our size, such as Wales and Scotland have three control centres, and going down to going to two control centres is the last thing you need in the face of rising call volumes.
Rising call volumes means we need more call handlers, not fewer, and the Chelmsford and Norwich centres already have recruitment and retention problems.
Chelmsford staff are trained up but then snapped up by higher paying posts in London, and Norwich has always struggled with staffing.
With the arrival of the new Universal Studios Park in Bedford and the growing population, local knowledge is going to be key with callers and dispatchers.
The experience of the people here cannot be replicated and we’re going to be losing thousands of years of experience and care. Trust leaders say they’re repurposing the building, so they’re still going to have to spend millions of pounds – its very hard to make a cost argument.
How can it be cheaper to refurbish the Bedford site and build a new site in Chelmsford compared to refurbishing Bedford alone?
If they’re going to be repurposed the building anyway, getting rid of 103 people can only be about getting rid of 103 people. It is wrong as the Trust tried to do it to pit operations centres against frontline services.
In terms of saving £1.2 million a year being, “the equivalent of funding is five to six extra ambulances that could serve up to 1000 more patients”, the fact is that the Trust would be getting that money anyway.
We need to be meeting the demand that exists and will exist in call handling, dispatching and on the front line, rather than false economics.
Management may talk about internal redeployment, but these staff are Band 3 and Band 4; there aren’t other jobs for them in the Trust.
These jobs are few and far between. It’s misleading.
Talking about 111, the fire service, the police and other services – they will not be able to take 103 people in Bedford and there is a risk that staff will be left facing unemployment or relocation.
Some staff may want to go to frontline, but frontline’s not for everybody. Many staff work in the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) precisely because they do not want to go to work in frontline or on the road.
As they mention the 217 other people working in Bedford, with 100 facing redundancy, you can see the huge scale of the proposed cuts and these cuts will have a negative impact on the Bedfordshire community.
What is upsetting is that the Trust was slammed by the CQC for its lack of diversity, so it is ironic that the Trust is closing the one place where diversity is not an issue.
The purported care for staff welfare is absolutely for the birds.
I can’t emphasise enough that they haven’t been engaging with the unions properly and they certainly didn’t consult us about such a significant plan.
Finally, the key point is that as much as the Trust likes to pretend it doesn’t, local knowledge does matter, especially for dispatching ambulances.
Road crews tell us this, call handlers tell us this, and dispatchers know this.
If the Trust is looking to expand our footprint, we know we’re going to need more road staff but we will need more dispatchers too with the local knowledges and the embedding in the community to support them.
Glenn Carrington
East of England Ambulance Service UNISON Branch Chair
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