PATIENTS groups across the South East have expressed “extreme disappointment” at South East Coast Ambulance Trust’s failings.

The Care Quality Commission has just published the results of its in-depth inspection of SECAmb and recommended that the trust be placed in special measures.

The inspection highlighted serious concerns including:

• In some cases, there were not enough staff, meaning those that work for the ambulance trust were under extreme pressure and overly tired.

• The trust was not meeting national targets for ambulance response times.

• 111 calls were not always responded to quickly enough.

• Equipment was not always maintained or supplied.

• Culture of bullying and harassment.

• Leadership was not supporting the staff to work properly.

The trust, which covers Kent, Surrey, Sussex and North East Hampshire, said it already had a recovery plan in place and had taken action across a number of areas to address concerns.

The report gives the trust a ‘good’ rating for its service being caring but judges the service ‘inadequate’ overall.

Commenting on behalf of all the six South Healthwatches, Kate Scribbins from Healthwatch Surrey said: “Naturally we are extremely disappointed to hear today’s announcement. Our ambulance trust has hit the headlines on several occasions in recent months and not for positive reasons.

“It is now imperative that the trust works with patients and local Healthwatch to make immediate improvements and that the public are reassured.

“People can help us in two ways, firstly by sharing their experience of the ambulance service with us and secondly by volunteering with Healthwatch and helping to improve services.”

Responding, SECAmb said that although recruiting and retaining enough staff remained a “significant issue”, 60 new front-line staff had joined the trust since April, together with 18 paramedics and 42 more emergency care support workers, with a further 289 staff in the pipeline to join by April 2017.

In addition, 53 new emergency medical advisors - 999 call-takers - have joined the trust with a further 40 to come by the year end. In NHS 111, 62 new health advisors have started this year and a further 36 are joining over coming months.

A detailed action plan focused on recruitment, retention, operational performance, staff engagement and external stakeholder engagement has been developed for NHS 111.

The trust claimed that as a result, its performance had steadily improved and in August it surpassed performance trajectories agreed with commissioners, on all measures.

The trust said it had worked hard to raise awareness of safeguarding processes with all staff, as well as creating a new process for on-going monitoring of safeguarding referrals by operational staff.

Acting chief executive Geraint Davies said: “I fully recognise that this is a challenging time for the trust and accept that these are serious concerns which we must address.

“We understand the seriousness of placement into special measures but value the additional support that this offers us. We expect that the move will mean the work we have already started can continue at pace.”