What support it plans to give to the Scottish Ambulance Service and, in particular, to the ambulance service in Lanarkshire to help them to…

The Scottish Executive has provided the Scottish Ambulance Service with an allocation of £108.783 million for 2002-03, an increase of 7.4% on last year. The indicative allocations for 2003-04 and 2004-05 provide for further uplifts of 7.4% in each year. These represent unprecedented levels of investment and reflect our support for the service's modernisation agenda. Across Scotland these increased resources will support the improvement of the service's operations rooms functions, the roll-out of priority based dispatch, the conversion of a number of part-time ambulance stations to full-time and the introduction of dedicated non-emergency transport services for renal dialysis patients. The service plans to employ around 200 additional staff over the next two years to support these developments.How these improvements are rolled-out across Scotland and how these additional staff are deployed are operational matters for the Scottish Ambulance Service and its divisions. For Lanarkshire, this means an additional 10 accident and emergency staff this financial year to help alleviate the problems of uncovered shifts. They will be fully trained and operational by mid-September. Over the next two years, the service will also be providing an additional 24 front-line paramedic vehicle crew staff for priority based dispatch. These two initiatives represent a 23% increase in current staff establishment. Another step which has been taken in Lanarkshire is the introduction of revised shift rotas to provide more effective cover. These rotas are constantly reviewed to ensure that resources match demand. The merger of the Glasgow and Motherwell operations (control) rooms (at Glasgow) in October will also allow for better deployment of emergency ambulances in the Lanarkshire area, since the merger will enable the operations rooms staff to know immediately where the emergency resources are across the area.The Scottish Executive monitors the performance of the Scottish Ambulance Service and holds the service to account through the Accountability Review process supported by the Performance Assessment Framework. The issues surrounding performance within the West Central Division, including Lanarkshire, were discussed at the Accountability Review meeting on Monday 5 August 2002. Response times performance across the six divisions of the service shall continue to be monitored by the department.