The challenge of running an emergency response fleet

With a fleet of 960 vehicles and attending over 400,000 incidents in 2011/12, South Central Ambulance Service has a tough job. We talk to head of fleet Rick Stillman about the Service’s challenging fleet operation and how it’s taking strides to become greener

Describe your fleet and its operation
South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) has a total fleet of around 960, of which 200 are front line ambulances and about 120 are marked-up response cars. The rest are staff cars, covert response cars, Patient Transport Service (PTS) buses and commercial vehicles.

The Service provides patient care to a resident population of more than four million and the millions more visitors we receive every year. The Service’s primary purpose is to respond to 999 emergency calls and to get the right treatment to patients with life-threatening conditions, serious injury or illnesses, as quickly as possible. In addition, we provide pre‑arranged transport for our patients, with medical needs, to and from the treatment centres via our Patient Transport Service.
 
What’s the history behind how SCAS was formed?  
South Central Ambulance Service was established on the 1 July 2006 following the merger of four ambulance trusts in the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire. This area covers approximately 3,554 square miles with a residential population of over four million.
 
You won Large Public Sector Fleet of the Year at the Fleet News Fleet Van Awards 2012. Explain why you won the award.
The fleet award goes to those van operators that are committed to keeping their drivers safe and their vehicles accident-free. In our case the award was in recognition for our systems and processes which have enabled us to achieve van excellence status from the Freight Transport Association (to date the only ambulance trust to be accredited), low accident rate, and reductions in CO2.
    
What was involved in gaining Van Excellence Status from the FTA?
We appointed Julie Larner as project manager to oversee the Van Excellence process and she tirelessly spent two months in the build up to the inspection documenting and auditing every process and working practice.
    
She created a spreadsheet that mirrored the Van Excellence inspection sheets to ensure every element of the audit had been covered.
    
We challenged some areas, such as licence checks, and put processes in place to prove they had been done.

Documentation was also tightened up, particularly logging the emergency equipment on the ambulances.
 
What is your carbon reduction strategy?  
We introduced a 120g/km CO2 cap on car emissions for non-emergency response cars and speed limiters on all commercials and operational vehicles (but these switched off when on blue lights).

What’s more, South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SCAS) is the first ambulance service in England to introduce solar panels on to its Rapid Response Vehicles (RRV).

Following a successful trial of the solar panels in January 2012, 36 of the Trust’s RRVs have now been installed with solar panels to supply power to the secondary battery system that powers all emergency equipment on these vehicles.

What benefits do the solar panels bring?
The introduction of solar panels means that vehicles no longer need to standby with their engines running to recharge essential battery systems, or to return to base to recharge vehicle battery systems. This means that the vehicles are unable to respond to emergencies whilst batteries are being charged.

The solar panels enable the RRVs to be fully mobile at all times and effectively means we have more vehicles able to respond to more incidents, more often.
SCAS will now be trialling solar panels on Front Line Double Crewed ambulances.

What technology/software do you use? What improvements has IT brought?
For Fleet management we use Jaama key 2, which replaced 4 legacy systems, bringing the whole trust onto a single platform.
    
We wanted a standard fleet management software system across the whole of the service so that we could accurately gauge fleet costs and manage workshop parts much more effectively to reduce vehicle downtime. We wanted complete visibility across all parts of the fleet for all vehicle and workshop administrators. We are now delivering significantly improved vehicle operating efficiencies and reducing operating costs.

With the emergency response nature of the fleet, what challenges do you come across?
Our two Emergency Operations Centres take 1030 emergency calls a day, 300 of which are potentially life-threatening.

In 2011/12 we took 510425 emergency and urgent calls and attended 411303
incidents. This huge demand on the service can be a challenge with diminishing financial resources.

What advice would you give to other fleet managers about running an efficient healthcare fleet?
Getting buy-in and support from all areas of the organisation is essential and removing surplus vehicles from fleet helps.