Community and Health Research Unit

A new book, Ambulance Services: Leadership and Management Perspectives by Professors Paresh Wankhade and Kevin Mackway-Jones, features a chapter on equality and diversity in prehospital care, co-authored by Viet-Hai Phung and Prof Niro Siriwardena of CaHRU together with Dr Karen Windle of the School of Health and Social Care. The new volume also refers to CaHRU’s work in developing indicators and processes for measuring and improving the quality of care provided by ambulance services.

The chapter, Responding to diversity and delivering equality in prehospital care: statutory responsibilities, best practice and recommendations, explores the impact of increasing diversity in the UK population and NHS workforce on prehospital care delivery. As public sector organisations, ambulance services are bound by The Equality Act 2010, which obliges them to promote equality and outlaw discrimination, harassment and victimisation of people with protected characteristics such as age, disability, race, gender and sexual orientation. Ambulance services use the Equality Delivery System (EDS), a voluntary toolkit that provides guidance about how they can achieve their duties set out in The Equality Act 2010. Building on the original EDS, the new EDS2 framework encourages organisations to flexibly reflect local sensitivities.

There are still significant variations in the quality of data that ambulance services possess for different protected characteristic groups, which also makes progress towards greater equality difficult to measure. The chapter summarises the current policy, problems in delivering this and potential solutions to overcome these.

Viet-Hai Phung

It was a pleasure to attend the European Congress on Emergency Medicine in the beautiful environs of Westerpark, Amsterdam from Sunday 28^th September – Wednesday 1^st October. I had been invited to give a three-minute presentation on the systematic review that I had been working on for two years, ‘Barriers, facilitators, disparities and consequences for people from minority ethnic groups accessing prehospital care: systematic review and narrative synthesis’.

Prior to going to Amsterdam, I had rehearsed the presentation many times. This carried on right through to an hour before the Monday afternoon Lightning Session I was due to present in. The ‘Lightning Session’ itself was due to last 90 minutes with 23 presenters summing up their research. I was 18^th up so at least I could get a feel for what to expect. I was nervous, but not shaking, as I made my way up to the podium, without notes. Before I started, I familiarised myself with how to work the slideshow to avoid any embarrassments, which previous presenters suffered. I knew exactly what I was going to say on each slide. There were minor departures from what I had planned to say, but I got the underlying message across to the audience. I felt I answered the question from the chair about uneven translation service provision in the UK competently. And that was that. Thorough preparation had made a seemingly daunting task manageable.

There were other interesting lightning presentations on prehospital care from around the world, but the conference focused more on clinical and emergency department research. However, I gained another valuable professional skill and spent some time in lovely Amsterdam. Which were no bad things at all!