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News Release 1st October 2007COMMENT ON END OF STAFFORDSHIRE AMBULANCE SERVICECommenting on the end of the independent Staffordshire Ambulance Service which became a part of the West Midlands Ambulance Service today (1st October), Michael Fabricant says: "It is a sad end to an era. Staffordshire Ambulance Service had become the top performing ambulance service in Europe yet the Government were determined to bulldozer through this merger with the West Midlands service. I take the view: if something isn't broken, why fix it? "In many meetings I have had with Anthony Marsh, the Chief Executive of the West Midlands Ambulance Service, he has insisted that standards of patient and emergency care will not fall in Staffordshire. I hope he is right. I have asked for, and he has now agreed to provide, performance data for Staffordshire alone to continue to be published and not be aggregated in to the West Midlands as a whole. I - and I am sure many others - will be closely scrutinising this data over the years to come to ensure that the high standards we already have are maintained in Staffordshire. "We have already seen the recent withdrawal of life-saving ResQPod resuscitation equipment from our ambulances and the future of our First Responders was put in doubt. Only time will tell whether standards will fall as a consequence. If they do, lives in Staffordshire will be lost unnecessarily and the Government will have blood on its hands." |
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