The Learning the Lessons Committee is a multi-agency committee established to disseminate and promote learning across the police service. Its members are: ACPO, APA, Home Office, IPCC, HMIC and the NPIA. The Committee produces bulletins with articles containing lessons from investigations.

Supporting The Ambulance Service

In the early hours of the morning the ambulance service called police to ask for support in responding to call which had a “hydrant” marker against the address. This meant that,

because of previous violence, ambulance crew were not allowed to attend without police support.

The incident was graded by police as a “Priority response” requiring dispatch within 30 minutes and arrival within the following 30 minutes. It was a particularly busy period and no police patrols were available to attend.

The STORM system used by the force had an automatic function to notify supervisor terminals when dispatch times had been missed on logs marked “for action”. However, during busy times the force did not use this feature as supervisors were often involved in dealing with live and often serious incidents, nor did they allocate anyone to monitor the list generated. Staff were instead required to ask a supervisor to view an incident record if required, with the supervisor then marking the incident to acknowledge that they had taken ownership for it.

The ambulance service called the police on six occasions over ten hours, but on each occasion no patrols were available. At one point a patrol was dispatched but was redirected en route to a higher priority incident. Police and ambulance service policies did not say what needed to be done when one agency failed to respond to a request from the other.

Nine hours after the request was first received from the ambulance service the head of the force area control room called the duty officer to request that the incident was resourced.

When contacted shortly after, the ambulance service confirmed that they had spoken to the man and he was safe and well.

Key questions – for policy makers/managers:

• Do your control room staff monitor the list of dispatch times missed on logs marked “for action” which are automatically generated by STORM?

• Do you issue clear guidance on how to deal with failure by the ambulance service to attend?

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