Referrals from staff
The attending ambulance staff complete a referral
and fax this to our Emergency Operations Centre, who in turn
forward this to the relevant local authority.
We are not in a position to differentiate
between how the issues raised are classified, and the management of
a referral rests with the host local authority, as each has its own
structure and we cannot expect our staff to be familiar with each
local authority’s management process.
Some local authorities have, however, decided
that any referral from us will be managed as a vulnerable adult or
child protection issue, irrespective of whether the issues meet the
authority’s definitions.
We make referrals as quickly as possible,
within 24 hours of the incident.
Obtaining further information
Where additional information is required following a referral by
our staff, or in relation to any safeguarding issue, we can provide
documents relating to the 999 call and the patient report form (the
record of the care assessment and treatment provided, completed by
the attending ambulance staff). This can take several days as the
forms are collected from all 76 of our ambulance stations and
collated at a central location.
We can usually answer any queries you may
have, for example to clarify clinical details, but it may sometimes
be necessary for safeguarding colleagues to discuss the incident
with the ambulance staff involved. This can be arranged, although
as it involves taking a crew off operational duty - impacting
on our ability to respond to 999 calls - this can take some time to
arrange and should only be requested where there is no reasonable
alternative.
We can also provide data about ambulance
attendance to specific addresses, sometimes referred to as
‘chronolator’ information.
Contacts
You should initially approach our patient
experiences department, preferably by emailing our secure NHS.net
email address - safeguarding.las@nhs.net. Wherever
possible, please have available the name of the patient, the
location the crew attended and the CAD reference number, all of
which should be included in the referral.
On the rare occasions that additional information is immediately
required outside of office hours, your email will be
picked up by our clinical support desk, who will try to help
you and will let Patient Experiences know about your enquiry
if they cannot resolve it themselves.
Feedback
We require an acknowledgement of any referral, and feedback on
the outcome of a referral, which should be emailed to safeguarding.las@nhs.net.
This allows us to complete the loop in updating the ambulance
staff who placed the referral, and to develop best practice in
terms of completing referrals.
From February, we will provide each local
authority lead with a monthly report on those referrals where an
acknowledgement or feedback on the outcome has not been
received.
We will also be approaching local authorities
during 2009 about trying to establish electronic reporting and a
single point of contact within each authority.
Structure at a local level
Each ambulance station complex has a nominated
Safeguarding Lead, usually the ambulance operations manager or a
delegated local manager, who has responsibility to represent us at
serious case reviews, strategy meetings etc and has
responsibility for a particular local authority or primary
care trust area.
This may differ from the ambulance station the
staff involved are based at, as they can respond to calls
out of their base area. Please note that whilst we recognise
that such meetings are frequently called at very short notice, as a
consequence of operational pressure it can be very difficult for us
to arrange for a local representative to attend at short
notice. Our patient experiences department will always notify
the local representative when a request is made for us to attend a
local meeting and provide you with the local manager’s contact
details. Initial contact should, however, always be to the patient
experiences department through our Safeguarding email address -
safeguarding.las@nhs.net.
Management of safeguarding
Our Safeguarding Group, chaired by our Medical
Director, takes lead responsibility for policy and practice. For
example, we recently led pan-London clarification of our role in
sudden unexpected death in infants, children and adolescents.
For more information, please see the group's terms
of reference (PDF, 13KB) and minutes
of the December 2009 meeting (PDF, 21KB).
Any enquiries relating to policy and procedure
should be made to the patient experiences department, or by email
to safeguarding.las@nhs.net.