South Central Ambulance Service outlines key plans for improvement
It includes new vehicles and a new dispatch system
New vehicles, a computer-aided dispatch system, and a smaller estate are among the measures South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) is seeking to improve efficiency and service delivery.
SCAS has “reframed” its delivery plans in response to changes across the wider NHS, aligning its work around five priorities: enabling services, digital transformation, clinical effectiveness, people and culture, and partnerships and sustainability.
These fall under a framework titled Fit for the Future.
The area covered by the service extends from Buckinghamshire to Hampshire through Berkshire and Oxfordshire.
Becky Southall, chief governance officer at SCAS, recently presented the plans to Southampton City Council’s health overview and scrutiny panel.
She said the trust is aiming to have 100 new vehicles in service by the end of next year and is working to improve capacity so that ambulances can return to the road more quickly.
Targets associated with these changes include ensuring no vehicle in the fleet is older than five years by December 2026 and reducing vehicle off-road rates by at least 20 per cent by the end of the 2025/26 financial year.
Another area of focus is the trust’s estate, with plans to reduce its size and age as SCAS moves towards a hub-and-spoke model in the long term.
Councillors were told a corporate restructure was carried out last year, resulting in a number of jobs being removed across the trust.
When asked how the Fit for the Future framework would help deliver the necessary savings, Ms Southall said the aim was to “work more efficiently and remove waste”.
She said: “The premiss around all of this is finding ways of working differently.
“For example, the computer-aided dispatch system will create a lot of efficiencies in terms of how we run our operations.
“It’s about taking out waste or inefficiency to create the savings that we need to make.
“I’m not going to say it’s easy and we’ve identified all of it, but we are a lot more advanced in this than we were the year before, as I understand it, and we delivered on our cost savings last year.”
The current target is for the dispatch system to be procured and mobilised by the end of March 2026.
Ms Southall told the panel that modernising the vehicle fleet would help reduce the time ambulances are off the road, enabling staff to focus on patient care.
She added: “It is all about creating a better infrastructure in some ways, hence the whole piece around digital, fleet and estates so we can drive efficiencies that way but our staff have been engaged in this piece of work and they understand where we are going with this.”