Adastral Park (Martlesham) is a private ambulance service which provides first aid support to those working in and visiting Adastral Park Business Park. All staff working for Adastral Park (Martlesham) work at Adastral Business Park and provide their service on a voluntary basis.Adastral Park (Martlesham) is operated by Adastral Park (Martlesham). It provides a patient transport service.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out an announced inspection on 17 October 2017.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we ask the same five questions of all services: are they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well-led?

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

Services we do not rate

We regulate independent ambulance services but we do not currently have a legal duty to rate them. We highlight good practice and issues that service providers need to improve and take regulatory action as necessary.

We found the following areas of good practice:

• The team carried out an annual major incident simulation training to ensure that the staff were prepared if an incident occurred on the site.

• There was a dedicated team of skilled volunteers who were proud to be part of the rapid response team and demonstrated excellent team work.

• There was a comprehensive training schedule in place to ensure that staff had the appropriate skills to respond to medical incidents at the site.

• The rapid response team worked together with the local ambulance trust as community first responders. This ensured training for team members and allowed them to maintain their skills. Team members were able to support the ambulance service in the local community.

• The service was recognised and valued by the working population of the business park.

• Comprehensive and appropriate risk assessments and policies were in place.

• A red flag protocol was in place to ensure that a medical emergency outside of the skill level of the rapid response team was escalated to the 999 service immediately.

However, we also found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve:

• There was a lack of formal governance. Incidents were not recorded and learning from incidents was not shared with staff effectively outside of team training sessions.

• There was a lack of oversight of equipment servicing.

• There was a lack of oversight of stock control and monitoring of consumable items expiration dates.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it must take some actions to comply with the regulations and that it should make other improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. We also issued the provider with one requirement notice Details are at the end of the report.

Heidi Smoult

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals, on behalf of the Chief Inspector of Hospitals

We were not able to talk with people who had received support and treatment from the service. During our inspection we spoke with the manager and two staff members.

We found that the provider was compliant in all of the outcome areas that we inspected. We saw that there were systems in place to ensure that people received a good quality and safe service from staff who were trained in their role.

In this report the name of a Registered Manager, Ian Catchpole, appears who was not in post and not managing the regulatory activities at this location at the time of the inspection. Their name appears because they were still a Registered Manager on our register at the time. We spoke with the service's manager and they assured us that they would formally notify us of the changes in management of the service. They would also make an application to cancel the previous registered manager to allow us to remove them from our records.