West Midlands Ambulance Control
The £2 million centre is home to Stafford Ambulance Station, a brand new state of the art Emergency Operations Centre (EOC), Fleet Workshops and Corporate Services. Staffordshire now has one of the most resilient response centres in the country.
The Chief Executive of the trust, Anthony Marsh, and Chairman of the West Midlands Ambulance Service Trust, Sir Graham Meldrum, greeted the MP for North Warwickshire. He was taken on a tour around the control room, designed to help ambulance crews get to patients faster, and provide a backup for other control rooms in the the West Midlands.
He was also shown the new hazardous area response team vehicles, at the base in Stafford, which would be deployed in the case of a major incident.
Speaking to StaffsLive, he said it was a an enormously impressive facility, and it is the “best the NHS can provide”. The new centre will “ensure hospitals are going to get patients there as quickly as possible, the ambulances are going to arrive at the scene and when I make a call… on 999, they will get an ambulance. This is a top class piece of kit, and these are highly skilled members of staff who are using it.”
He also said that the new centre will not divert funds to other areas of the NHS, such as the Mid Staffordshire NHS trust.
The Trust’s Chief Executive, Anthony Marsh, said he thinks the operations centre will enhance their service. He explained to StaffsLive that they were outgrowing the control room, and by moving to a new centre, they can use better technology, including digital radios and a new computer aided dispatch system.
The control room is split into two. On one side is the standard control centre for Staffordshire, deploying ambulance crews on day to day business. On the other side, it is set up to be used in the case of a major emergency. It can take staff from all areas, operating out of one base, to help streamline the response. The control centre processes around 3000 calls a week, with about 80 staff working in the emergency operations room.
