East Midlands Ambulance Services prepares for winter pressures
The winter months are traditionally one of the busiest times of year for the NHS
Brand new ambulances, additional 999 call handlers and staff welfare vehicles to provide hot drinks to frontline crews are just some of the steps being taken by East Midlands Ambulance Service to make sure it's ready for winter.
The winter months are traditionally one of the busiest times of year for the NHS due to increases in flu cases and cold weather-related illnesses such as trips and falls.
For the ambulance service it can also become more challenging to reach patients in need due to adverse weather and subsequent poor road conditions.
David Williams, Deputy Director of Operations at EMAS, said: “There are three key focusses for us at EMAS this winter – the welfare of our staff, ensuring we have as many frontline colleagues available to respond as possible to help keep our patients safe, and reducing any unnecessary demand on our emergency service.
“This means working with both our senior EMAS clinicians and healthcare colleagues so that only patients who genuinely need an ambulance receive one, and all other patients are suitably signposted to the medical help that they need.
“We also continue to work daily with our NHS system partners to respond to the challenges relating to hospital handover delays so that our highly-trained ambulance crews can be back out responding to the next patient in the community who needs our help.
“The public can help us by practising self-care and utilising their local pharmacies, GP surgery, NHS111 online or Urgent Treatment Centres when they have a medical issue, and only calling us in genuinely life-threatening emergencies, so that we can be there for people when they really do need us.”