The ambulance trust serving Surrey and the South East has lost its contract to provide non-emergency patient transport service (PTS) to vulnerable patients.
The South East Coast Ambulance Service (Secamb) had provided transport for qualifying patients who had pre-booked appointments at hospitals and GP surgeries, but lost out after their renewed bid to continue providing the service failed.
The South Central Ambulance Service will instead take over from April 1, 2017, with the contract to last for the next five years.
NHS Surrey and Surrey County Council had awarded Secamb the PTS contract in June 2012.
A Secamb spokesman said: "This news sadly sees the end of SECAmb providing PTS in its region after a long and proud history. We would like to pay tribute to the dedication and commitment of our PTS staff across Surrey and thank them for their continued professionalism.
“Staff directly affected will be contacted to discuss next steps and how the process will work moving forward.
“We will be also working closely with trade unions, local commissioners and with the future provider South Central Ambulance Service in the coming months.”
The loss comes after SECAmb was ordered to improve by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in July – the most recent in a long list of red flags being raised over the trust’s governance in recent months.
The CQC issued the embattled trust with a warning notice last month, and gave SECAmb until September 10 to improve. If it does not improve by then, the service could have its remit narrowed, or it could face legal action, a CQC inspection manager warned.
Understaffing, delayed response times, and failing to prevent abuse were among the CQC’s chief concerns.
In October 2015, inspectors from health regulator Monitor criticised the trust for being “poorly managed”.
From March: South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAmb) 111 pilot scheme had 'fundamental failures in governance'
In March, auditors from Deloitte carried out an independent review into SECAmb after an NHS pilot scheme was trialled with the trust. Inspectors found “fundamental failures in governance” and that ambulance dispatch times were delayed.
Inspectors also found that chief executive of the trust Paul Sutton had signed off on the “re-triaging” of emergency calls, effectively restarting the clock for the purposes of logging response times.
Two months later Mr Sutton took a “mutually-agreed leave of absence”.
The CQC told this website in July that it would publish a full report of its inspection findings into SECAmb soon.
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