A national medical transport company is embracing change by implementing new procedures to ensure their service to NHS contracts is seamless and meets overarching objectives within the organisation.
With the NHS rolling out new reporting frameworks across the board, including Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) and Learning from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE), secondary care providers and trusted system partners, E-zec is adopting new processes in line with these developments and they’re using it as a toolkit to further enhance their own learning, quality improvement and development opportunities.
Anna Prowse, Head of Quality and Compliance at E-zec, said: “It’s an incredibly bold decision by the NHS in changing the reporting framework, but it’s exactly how reporting should be. PSIRF will dictate how as a provider we respond to an incident with LFPSE as a national and centralised system for recording and analysing patient events.
“As a secondary care provider, both are now mandatory at E-zec. PSIRF is due to be in place and embedded business-wide by September 2023 and LFPSE implementation being extended to September. The NHS have recognised that the existing framework was no longer fit for purpose, and didn’t actively work to enhance the culture of the industry – or the businesses working in partnership with it.
“PSIRF will provide immense learning opportunities for us and our Ambulance Care Assistants (ACAs) out on the road. It will provide us valuable insight and support our pillars of quality: complaints, incidents, health and safety, infection prevention and control, medicine management, and safeguarding. It will capture all feedback from service users (and colleagues) – both positive and constructive – and enable us to understand areas that need additional support, how we can prevent incidents reoccurring, or replicate great service for users in the future. All-in-all, it will enhance the service we provide, and ensure an even higher standard of care is achieved.
“But, alongside this, it promotes a just culture, which we entirely endorse at E-zec. It supports a culture of fairness, openness and learning, and allows staff to feel empowered and confident to speak up when things go wrong, rather than fearing blame. Supporting our team to be open about mistakes allows valuable lessons to be learnt so that the same errors can be prevented from being repeated. We value honesty, integrity, and the yearning to continually improve and make a difference.”
E-zec was established in 1998 and has since grown to become a trusted provider of high-quality specialist healthcare transport for patients across the UK. The business began as a single ambulance providing repatriation services for people who became ill abroad, but has since grown to the become the largest independent provider of specialist transport, healthcare support, and clinical services nationwide.
