West Midlands Ambulance Service University NHS Foundation Trust

Commercial Capabilities

SPECIALIST SERVICES

• Emergency, acute, urgent, non-urgent covering all ages through the life cycle

• Delivering and recruiting into research at the roadside and bedside, at time of acute injury or illness without time or location limitations

• Hazardous Area Response Team (HART)

• Medical Emergency Response Intervention Team (MERIT)

• Mental Health Triage Car

• Critical Care Car

SPECIALIST FACILITIES

• 15 Ambulance Hubs (centralisation of staff)

• 2 x Emergency Operations Centres

• Electronic Patient Record (EPR)

• Computer Aided Dispatch (999 call/call triage/ambulance response data)

• NHS Pathways user as a 999 call triage system

• National Ambulance Resilience Unit www.naru.org.uk

• >95% of ambulances have a paramedic on every vehicle  

• All responses are conveying vehicles (i.e. no rapid response cars)

• All ambulance responses fully kitted i.e. 12 lead ECG, Defibrillator, Blood Pressure Monitoring, Blood Sugar, Ketones, Intravenous access

• Video call capability

• Serving a population of 5.6 million people

• Around 5000 clinical staff

• Around 1 million emergency 999 calls received a year

• Patient Transport Services for Non Emergency transport

• Bariatric equipment/Bariatric response vehicle

• 4x4 capability

CHIEF INVESTIGATOR/PRINCIPAL  INVESTIGATOR EXPERTISE

• CTIMPs, non-CTIMPS, randomised controlled trials of medicines and devices, controlled drug studies, research involving patients who lack capacity, research involving large datasets, qualitative work, feasibility and pilot studies

• All undertaken in challenging pre-hospital environments for varying conditions and patient groups, and also the health, wellbeing and experiences of staff across all departments

AREAS KEEN TO GROW

• Public Health, Mental Health, Clinical Decision Making, Use of AI (phone/EPR etc), Sustainability, Infection Prevention/Communicable Disease, paediatrics

• Medicine administration routes and their effectiveness

• Improving use of routine data for patient and staff benefit as we collect data at unique points in an electronic system with rapid access to near real-time data

RECRUITMENT ACHIEVEMENTS 

• Datasets are electronic and CRFs are often entered first working day after patient enrolment. Almost always within 5 days

• From LIP provision to confirmation of capacity can be 6 weeks, enabling rapid go lives of studies where early engagement with the Trust has been sought due to the unique challenges of delivering emergency ambulance research

Research 

Team