Updated 28 February 2022
Kent Central Ambulance Service Ltd is operated by Kent Central Ambulance Service Ltd. The service provides patient transport services and emergency and urgent care services.
The main service this location provides is patient transport services. NHS non-emergency patient transport services help people access healthcare in England. It is free at the point of use for patients who meet certain medical criteria and are unable to use public or other transport. This service is subcontracted to provide support to primary contract holders that supply this service to the people in Maidstone and the surrounding area including parts of London.
The service also provides high dependency transfers for patients travelling between hospitals. This is the only aspect of the service that is provided under emergency and urgent care.
This service was first inspected using our comprehensive inspection methodology in May 2019, where we found regulation breaches in the well-led question that required the provider to comply with actions related to those breaches. The provider has now met all the compliance actions.
The service has had a registered manager since November 2018. The provider is registered to undertake the following regulated activity:
- Transport services, triage and medical advice provided remotely
- Treatment of disease, disorder or injury
From January 2021 to January 2022, the provider completed 34,487 patient journeys.
We previously rated the patient transport service as good for safe, effective, caring and responsive and requires improvement for well led. The overall rating in May 2019 was good.
We did a short notice announced inspection of this location’s patient transport service to see if changed practices were embedded. We inspected well-led and some aspects of safe. We did not inspect effective, caring and responsive. We rated the service as good for well-led and we did not rate safe. The overall rating for the service was good.