Comment: Don’t waste our cash on taxis

Jul 9 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

CONSIDERING the financial pressures that many emergency services are under at the moment, the fact that Merseyside’s ambulance service spent £35,000 on taxis in just one month because it did not have enough staff to man its own vehicles, is money that it can ill afford to spend.

This extra financial outlay came about because of staff shortages combined with high numbers of patients. It was used by the service’s Patient Transport Service (PTS), which transports non-emergency patients to and from hospital.

Taxis are not specifically budgeted for within the service, but a limited use of them is expected when other transport is not available.

It is a sobering thought that so much money has gone from Merseyside’s ambulance service directly into the coffers of taxi firms. An overspend of £35,000 in one month, with an overall budget of £435,000 to play with, is no mean sum.

A spokeswoman for the North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) said the use of taxis to convey patients to hospital was “due to a variety of reasons including volume of patients, unforeseen delays in treatment and vacancies in patient transport service”.

NWAS has now drawn up a pilot scheme to combat inefficiency, along with an ongoing recruitment campaign to fill the vacancies within the PTS.

As part of the drive to tackle inefficiency, the ambulance service plans to improve the use of technology by piloting a satellite navigation system in PTS vehicles.

This would enable them to utilise down-time while waiting to collect patients undergoing treatment by, for example, quickly locating addresses to carry out short journeys such as transporting discharges or transferring patients.

Given the scale of overspending on taxis, it is good to see action is now being taken to address this issue. Scarce resources are too precious to be squandered in this way.