Follow this link to a reply received from WMAS which has in turn prompted the letter below.

Dear Sir Michael,

Thank you for your letter of the 3rd August 2007. I am most grateful to you for writing to Mr. Anthony Marsh of the West Midlands Ambulance Service on my behalf regarding the proposed closure of Hereford and Worcester Emergency Operations Centre at Bransford. Thank you forwarding a copy of his reply to me.

Regrettably I feel his reply falls a long way short of addressing our concerns and in no way alleviates my fears that this proposal has dire consequences for the population of your constituency.

I detect a severe lack of attention to detail in his reply and suspect this lack of attention to detail has previously been extended to the preparation of the proposal. Information from Mr. Marsh and the press office is tailored to each recipient, when this information is collated it is more often than not found to be contradictory and misleading. Subtly we are led to believe that what Brierly Hill EOC aspires to be, already exists and that Hereford and Worcester EOC is beyond redemption. Replies to questions and concerns are frequently dismissive and flippant.

We are repeatedly encouraged to ‘read the proposals’, there is no choice, there is but one proposal.

I have addressed each point in turn as it appears on Mr. Marsh’s letter.

Mr. Marsh goes to great lengths in his letter to explain the performance of the Shropshire EOC at Shrewsbury against the EOC at Brierley Hill. I understand that Shrewsbury EOC is also faced with closure under the proposal, but fail to understand how their performance compared with Brierly Hill impact upon our opposition to the closure of Bransford control in Hereford and Worcester.

There is no guarantee that Bransford staff retained will be dedicated to answering calls received from their known locality. All calltakers will be pooled, so could take calls from Coventry and Warwick, Birmingham Black Country, Staffordshire, Shropshire or Hereford and Worcester. With three Hereford and Worcester calltakers on shift at any one time, and fifty seats in the Brierly Hill control room, the chance of a Hereford and Worcester caller getting a Hereford and Worcester calltaker is extremely slim. Two radio dispatchers per shift will deal with dispatching responses to incidents in Hereford and Worcester, these two radio dispatchers will not be available take calls. Faced with the prospect of a tortuous daily commute to Brierly Hill, rather than relocate, staff, I’m sure, would elect to seek alternative employment. Instantly this erodes at the fabled retention of local knowledge and negates Mr. Marsh’s argument. I can’t deny that technology has moved forward in leaps and bounds, but it is still prone to failure. Additionally, not all technology moves forward at the same speed, not all landline telephone numbers will generate a plot on a map in a control centre and it is likely that these numbers will be found in more rural, and therefore less identifiable locations. Equally emergency calls can be made on behalf of someone else, when the point plotted may not be the point at which assistance is required. Which Emergency Operations Centre can triangulate mobile calls? This comment is imprecise.

We all know that there are an alarmingly small number of ambulances available to cover the two counties. We also know that of these a greater number are allocated to urban areas rather than rural areas, we all know that ambulances are moved about the region like pieces on a chess board and crews regularly find themselves covering unfamiliar territory. Given this, the argument that many crews have lived in an area all their lives, know it so intimately that there will be no problems simply unravels at the seams. Crews may have lived in an area all their lives, but there’s no guarantee that that is where they will expected to work for the full duration of their shift. Conversely Mr. Marsh then claims that it is impossible for EOC staff to know every single location within their county, what is applied to one condition should be applied in the other. Within a small local control room you have a valuable pool of local knowledge which can be shared and augmented, in the strategy proposed all this would be lost. Mr. Marsh says that there are no plans to close any ambulance stations, crews will continue to be locally based. Mr. Marsh is also on record quite recently for saying ‘things change’.

I am not at all convinced by Mr. Marsh’s comments that cost savings are not at the heart of this proposal. Whilst a number of localities may be recruiting they are failing to fill those posts, Hereford and Worcester EOC is understaffed and has been prevented from recruiting because the Consultation Board see this proposal as a done deal. If, as we are asked to believe, other options will be considered why has Bransford been allowed to operate at a disadvantage?

If ‘service delivery must be organised around the needs of the citizen or business – not the needs of the organisation’ then this proposal fails to deliver a satisfactory alternative to the current situation. It is incumbent upon the WMAS Trust Board to provide more than one alternative for public consultation. The remit from the Department of Health has not been met if the public is offered a ‘like it or lump it’ deal which clearly serves no more than the WMAS Trust Board’s own objectives and self gratification.

The consultation document fails entirely to provide evidence of ‘extensive research’.

No one has argued that ‘no change’ is an option. However the only alternative offered by the Trust Board is unacceptable. I cannot see how centralising resources in an urban environment with technology likely to fail if installed in more than two locations will make the service more resilient. As Mr. Marsh is keen to tell us ‘technology has moved forward in leaps and bounds’ it therefore cannot be beyond the whit of man to disseminate dependable technology to localised control centres, ensuring all their benefits are retained whilst developing the security of a networked ‘virtual control room’. There are better alternatives to providing resilience other than simply creating a facsimile for what will fail in one, will surely fail in the other.

It is the Trust’s responsibility under the Civil Contingencies Act to ensure adequate and appropriate arrangements are in place to ensure continuity of services, in addition ‘service delivery must be organised around the needs of the citizen or business – not the needs of the organisation’. I can only repeat that it is incumbent upon the WMAS Trust Board to provide more than one alternative for public consultation, not simply propose the first thing that pops into their heads as the only possible course of action.

I don’t recall expressing any views concerning Mr. Keetch, nor making any request regarding Freedom of Information. However, I do share Mr. Marsh’s hope that Mr. Keetch makes a full recovery.

I suspect but am not surprised that Mr Marsh and his Board have entirely got their wires crossed with this reply, much in the same way that they have failed to fulfill their remit with their proposal, I therefore urge you to do all in your power to prevent this proposal from coming to fruition.

Finally, given recent events, Mr. Marsh and the press office’s antediluvian cry of Bransford not being ‘fit for purpose’ doesn’t hold water.

Yours sincerely,

R.N. Prosser.

Edited from Richard Burt Parliamentary Candidate's newsletter 10th August

Our campaign to save the county's Ambulance Service Call Centre continues to gather pace. On Wednesday evening, the West Midlands Ambulance Service Trust held a public consultation meeting at County Hall in Worcester. In truth, this meeting seemed to be nothing more than a good public relations exercise for the Trust. Any proper consultation period would present the public with several options, or at least look at possible alternatives. Unfortunately however, we are told that whilst we can present other 'business plans', they will only be considered if the current plan is rejected by the Trust's board - whatever the public think of it. 'Business plans' indeed - this is a public service!!!

Needless to say that the call centre staff, local councillors and I will continue to oppose the current plan and will meet next week to draw up a viable alternative. Once again, I ask you to sign the online petition at Worcester News.

Letter from Parliamentary Candidate Harriet Baldwin to the Chief Executive WMAS Trust Board.

Thank you very much for your letter of 7th August 2007 about the closure of the Bransford EOC.

I am grateful for the time you have taken to clarify the points I raise, but I confess there are still several points where I remain unclear.

You acknowledge that local knowledge is useful but not essential. I understand that the current local staff will be retained within a divisional dispatch area. The point I raise is that over time this will erode with staff attrition. What plans are in place to make sure that long term recruitment policies ensure that people who know Herefordshire and Worcestershire well are brought in to maintain this useful local knowledge?

You say that your team were surprised by my comments about the move to a single EOC for the whole country. We had quite a long discussion about this. It was prompted by my question about following the logic of this merger to its conclusion we would soon find that the NHS could move the call centre to India. Quite rightly this was seen to be something that would “not have public support or confidence”. However, I was informed that the air ambulance dispatch does rely on a more national approach. I confess that I took this whole discussion to be an acknowledgement that management logic would dictate further mergers. I would be very grateful if you could state in writing that the NHS has no plans to merge services further.

On resilience I do acknowledge that the current fallback arrangements for Bransford need investment. Again if we follow management logic on resilience you would probably again choose only two national call centres that could back each other up. Clearly any system as vital to the public as the 999 service needs to have a significant level of redundant capacity built into its structure to cope with unpredictable peaks in capacity.

In conclusion, I believe the correct decision to maintain the right level of local knowledge for the long term as well as the right level of resilience is to upgrade the technology at Bransford and use Brierley Hill as the fallback on the same secure network.