PTS-247 Ltd is operated by PTS-247 Ltd. It provides a patient transport service.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out the announced part of the inspection on 30 January 2018.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we ask the same five questions of all services: are they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well-led?

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

Services we do not rate

We regulate independent ambulance services but we do not currently have a legal duty to rate them. We highlight good practice and issues that service providers need to improve and take regulatory action as necessary.

We found the following areas of good practice:

• The majority of comment cards completed by service users which we reviewed gave positive feedback about the service and staff.

• Incidents were reported and investigated, with lessons learnt documented.

• We saw consistent documentation regarding the cleaning of vehicles.

• Vehicles were in good working order and well maintained.

• There was a low number of complaints compared to the number of journeys undertaken by the service.

However, we also found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve:

• There was no policy or procedure relating to the duty of candour.

• No staff had received an appraisal within the last 12 months.

• The provider was in the process of putting staff through a care certificate qualification, which included multiple standards. However, in the interim period there was no clear way of having an overview of the percentage of staff that were up to date or had not completed their training.

• It was not clear from the certificates we saw what level of safeguarding training staff had attained. However, as the service did transport children, a minimum of safeguarding children level two was required.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it must take some actions to comply with the regulations and that it should make other improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. We also issued the provider with one requirement notice. Details are at the end of the report.

Amanda Stanford

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (South).