At the meeting, Chief Executive Anthony Marsh made the following admissions in response to questioning from the general public, staff and members of the Herefordshire PCT Board.
1.Ambulance vehicles will now cover the whole region because new technology will show availability for the whole of the West Midlands. Under the current system, when vehicles dispatched by Bransford are lent to other parts of the West Midlands, they are then are brought back into the two counties. Anthony Marsh admitted that a higher volume of cases in the urban area would suck vehicles into the Birmingham conurbation and the Trust would have to buy new ambulances for Birmingham to try to reduce this impact.
2.Remote rural areas far from Birmingham, such as the South of Worcestershire and the South West of Herefordshire will "get a worse service". This is because the West Midlands Ambluance Trust call centre is a regional call centre, not nationally linked to Wales, Oxfordshire or Gloucestershire.
3.The Trust "can't rule out" further closures or consolidation of call centres in the future.
4.Despite the fact that local knowledge is considered "useful, but not essential", there are no plans to ensure long-term retention of local knowledge about Herefordshire and Worcestershire as new staff will not be tested on local knowledge about the two counties.
5.The consultation paper leaves out a lot of the costs of closure. If these were made available by the Trust, the financial implications of closure would look much less attractive than the numbers stated. Specifically the following costs are not in the plans: (i) the cost of providing several new ambulances for Birmingham, (ii) the cost of compensating staff for their additional costs, which are more than £400,000 over 5 years, (iii) the cost of any voluntary redundancies agreed with the unions.
Harriett Baldwin said, "It is clear that closing Bransford is the worst of all possible worlds for the people of Worcestershire and Herefordshire. Not only are we losing life-saving local knowledge over the long term, but the call centre is so focussed on the Birmingham area that our ambulances will get sucked in that direction too. If the Trust were at least proposing a nationally networked call centre we would be able to work across regional boundaries with Wales, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. Instead, we no longer have a Herefordshire and Worcestershire-based ambulance service, we have a Birmingham ambulance service. I urge the Trust to reconsider these proposals and upgrade the technology and network link at Bransford. I am sure it will cost less than the unspecified cost of new ambulances, travel and voluntary redundancy."