Two directors have resigned from an ambulance service judged this week to be providing “inadequate” patient care.
Dr Mathew Beattie, the medical director of North East ambulance service, left on Tuesday, a day before a damning report was published into the organisation’s failings.
Sarah Rushbrooke, NEAS director of quality and safety, will leave at the end of February, an NEAS spokesperson said.
Both were working out six-month notice periods, having resigned last year, the spokesperson added. Each have already found new roles, with successors appointed at NEAS.
On Wednesday a report from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) said patients were facing treatment delays as some NEAS crews did not have time to complete vehicle medicine checks. There was a lack of sufficient availability of life-saving medicines, discrepancies in the number of medicines, missing medicines and incorrectly tagged medicine bags, the report said.
The CQC said there had been a “deterioration” of services and rated the trust’s emergency and urgent care as “inadequate”. The overall rating for the service was “requires improvement”.
Sarah Dronsfield, CQC’s deputy director of operations in northern England, said: “We found a deterioration in the services being provided, especially in urgent and emergency care where this had potential for people to be placed at risk of harm.”
NEAS is responsible for emergency care for 2.7 million people. The service was given a warning notice after inspectors found significant improvements were needed during their unannounced visit in September.
Beattie’s resignation, first reported by the BBC, came after a terrible year for NEAS. Last May NEAS’s chief executive, Helen Ray, offered her “unreserved apologies” after whistleblowers told the Sunday Times that managers filtered out inconvenient facts from incident reports before they were sent to the coroner, in order to present paramedics in a more flattering light.
A spokesperson from NEAS said: “Dr Beattie gave notice six months ago that he would be leaving the trust at the end of January to take up a new role. We are delighted that Dr Kat Noble joined the trust on 31 January as replacement medical director.
“Our director of quality and safety, Sarah Rushbrooke, was successfully appointed to a new role in a neighbouring NHS trust in September 2022 and will be leaving NEAS at the end of February.
“We are delighted that Julia Young, an experienced lead nurse in the NHS, will be joining us at the end of the month.”
