More staff vital to cut taxi bill

Aug 29 2008 by Toby Chapman, Liverpool Daily Post

THE amount being spent on taxis for patients by the North West Ambulance Service is nothing sort of astonishing. More than £300,000 has been sucked from the budget to pay for taxis for patients, as there are not enough drivers for the service’s own vehicles.

NWAS spent £761,766 in Cheshire and Merseyside on alternative transport provision – £316,782 of which was on taxis.

These are huge amounts of money; for a life-saving service that has to make every penny count – the idea that hundreds of thousands of pounds can be lost this way is an appalling one.

The Daily Post revealed in July how the service had overspent £35,000 on taxis in April alone. The latest figures, obtained after requests were submitted by this newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act, paint an even more disturbing picture.

There is a budget to provide alternative transport for non-emergency patients when ambulances or drivers are unavailable, but it is £450,000 per year – hardly adequate in the current circumstances.

The problems, according to the ambulance service, have been caused by staff vacancies; there are more than 14 unfilled positions at present, some of whom would normally drive ambulances and provide transport services.

Nevertheless, as the Ambulance Service Union points out, this is a pretty thin reason for running up such vast bills on alternative transport. The union says back-filling vacancies created by promotions should be a key task for the service; yet such simple common sense seems yet to prevail here.

The solution, according to the NWAS, is a recruiting push and the piloting of a sat nav system aimed at improving efficiency. For the sake of those non-emergency patients who might spend hours waiting for ambulance transport, for the sake of those who have to be ferried long distances by taxi, and – most of all – for the sake of the ambulance service itself, we should all fervently hope that these measures will be enough.