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| Ambulance chairman in NHS 111 calls row 'told to go' | Ambulance chairman in NHS 111 calls row 'told to go' |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| The chairman of the scandal-hit South East Coast Ambulance Service (Secamb), Tony Thorne, has been told to leave his post, the BBC understands. | The chairman of the scandal-hit South East Coast Ambulance Service (Secamb), Tony Thorne, has been told to leave his post, the BBC understands. |
| The trust is being investigated after it dodged national response targets in order to take extra time to assess some seriously-ill patients. | The trust is being investigated after it dodged national response targets in order to take extra time to assess some seriously-ill patients. |
| Health regulator Monitor has reportedly told the chairman to go, while the position of the chief executive Paul Sutton is still unclear. | Health regulator Monitor has reportedly told the chairman to go, while the position of the chief executive Paul Sutton is still unclear. |
| The trust would not comment. | The trust would not comment. |
| Last October it emerged Secamb, which covers Kent, Surrey, Sussex and North East Hampshire, delayed sending help for certain 111 calls, transferring them instead to the 999 system, in a pilot project. | |
| It did this to re-assess what type of advice or treatment patients needed and whether an ambulance was really required. | |
| How call handling was changed | |
| Secamb provides NHS 111 services across the region and responds to 999 calls. | |
| Some 111 calls were transferred to the 999 system to give Secamb more time for more urgent calls. | |
| The calls affected were in the second most serious category - Category A Red 2 - which covers conditions like strokes or fits but which are less critical than where people are non responsive. | |
| Under NHS rules, calls designated as life-threatening are supposed to receive an ambulance response within eight minutes. | |
| The trust allowed itself an extra 10 minutes to deal with some calls by "re-triaging" patients in the 999 system. | |
| At the time, health regulator Monitor said the trust had not fully considered patient safety. | |
| It said the project was "poorly handled" and there were "reasonable grounds to suspect that the trust is in breach of its licence." | |
| It added a condition to Secamb's licence, so that if insufficient progress was made the leadership team could be changed. | |
| The trust defended the project but acknowledged the "serious findings". | |
| A Monitor spokesperson said on Tuesday: "As part of our ongoing regulatory action, we asked South East Coast Ambulance NHS Foundation Trust to commission a detailed review of the Red 3 project, including the way decisions were made about it. | |
| "This review is yet to be published. We will provide an update on our regulatory response in due course." | |
| The Secamb spokesman said: "It is not appropriate for the trust to comment on the position of any individuals at this stage.' |