Is Our Patient Transport Still Failing Staff & Patients?—Stephen Lloyd, 1 September 2016
Sorry folks this is a complicated one but stick with it as it affects our NHS…….
Many of you will remember last April when there was a change in non-urgent patient care transportation locally, the then provider – SECAMB – lost the contract to a new company called Coperforma, and we soon heard how bad the new service was. I posted myself about it a couple of times as I was contacted by a number of patients and drivers who were dismayed at the deterioration in standards.
Apparently though, more recently the service was supposed to be getting much better – for both patients and the drivers – which was good news.
However, unfortunately this doesn’t appear to be the case and I’ve been told there are still poor practices taking place.
For example in In the first instance the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) provided by Coperforma do appear much better – upwards of 95% patient satisfaction. Tremendously encouraging, until I was recently told by some of the staff that Coperforma are only publicising the ‘completed journeys’ in the figure and NOT the ‘failed to pick up’ or ‘incomplete journeys’. If this is true it could mean there 95% is utterly spurious.
I stress I have no proof – only what I have been told. So if any of my FB followers can enlighten me via a private message please do so.
The other area where things are most certainly not getting better has been Coperforma’s treatment of some of the staff via its sub-contractors, including one which only recently went into administration, called VM Langfords.
It appears that the company who replaced Langfords – called Dockland Medical Services (DMS) – had agreed, along with Coperforma, to take on all the drivers under the same terms and conditions.
Shockingly this promise has just been turned on its head and it’s been brought to my attention that DMS have written to all the transferred staff saying they will now be given notice and dismissed from their current NHS contracts, and offered inferior pay and terms contracts on a take it or leave it basis.
If this is true it is an absolute disgrace. The whole point of TUPE (a legal protection for staff in the NHS if another provider – usually private – becomes their employer) is to protect NHS staff from unscrupulous cost-cutting measures. Why is this being ignored?
So, let’s get this all straight: it’s been alleged to me that Copeforma are basically massaging their performance KPI’s, and a bunch of local drivers who have given a valued service to patients for years when they were with SECAMB are now being totally sold down the river.
Meanwhile at the original CCG (High Weald) which made the commissioning choice of going with Coperforma in the first place, no-one has being held to account!
And in Eastbourne what have we really got in return?
A form of back-door privatisation of an NHS service that is now worse than it was and where many of the staff are being treated dreadfully.
Not good, not good at all…….
Stephen Lloyd was the Liberal Democrat MP for Eastbourne from 2010 to 2015. Following his defeat on 7 May 2015 by Conservative candidate Caroline Ansell, he announced he would retire from politics. He said he “never had as much fun as being MP for Eastbourne and Willingdon”. During his campaign in the 2015 Election. a theme emerged on posters, “Everyone knows someone who has been helped by Stephen”. He lost his seat by 733 votes. On 15 July 2016 Stephen Lloyd announced that he had decided to re-stand as the MP for Eastbourne in the next General Election.
