Ambulance Services: Emergency Calls

(asked on 24th September 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure ambulance emergency control room computer systems have effective back-ups and safeguards to prevent control room staff from having to use paper based systems for 999 calls.


Answered by
Edward Argar Portrait
Edward Argar
Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
This question was answered on 7th October 2020

Local ambulance trusts have responsibility for their own computer systems with governance processes in place to regularly monitor the risk of IT failure. Each ambulance trust in England has a least two control centres with separate infrastructure so they can continue to provide emergency services in the event of IT issues on one site.

NHS England and NHS Improvement support ambulance trusts to increase their infrastructure resilience through the Ambulance Improvement Programme building on the findings published in Lord Carter’s report entitled ‘Operational productivity and performance in English NHS ambulance trusts: Unwarranted variations’.

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