The team looking after North East Ambulance Service workers, who support around 1.5 million patients across the North East every year, have been accredited for providing safe, effective, quality care for those people we rely on in an emergency.
Pivotal to the health and welfare of the people who respond to North East residents in their hour of need is the Trust’s occupational health team, which has now received Safe Effective Quality Occupational Health Service accreditation (SEQOHS) since 2013.
The SEQOHS standards are the industry benchmark for occupational health service.
North East Ambulance Service employees over 3,000 employees who provide urgent and emergency care for callers to 111 and 999, along with a patient transport service to support people to get to and from scheduled hospital appointments.
Director of people and development at NEAS, Karen O’Brien says, “It’s really important that we look after our people, so that they can look after our patients. Our occupational health team is expert in everything from vaccination to mental health or Musculo-skeletal issues and with their skills, we can offer our teams a bespoke service that can make a real difference to their health and wellbeing and that can mean we have a healthy workforce ready to respond to patients.
“Accreditation like this means that we are offering the very best standards of care to our colleagues, which is a high priority for us at NEAS. I would like to say a big thank you to the whole team for their continuous hard work and in striving to improve the service each year.”
The team is made up of seven members of staff including occupational health specialist nurses, a physiotherapist, a consultant physician, nurse advisors and occupational health administrators.
The renewed accreditation is now valid until 2028.
