Patient Transport: Call for action

Suffolk Community Transport are presently asking all their members to write a joint letter to all senior people in NHS Suffolk and the Suffolk Ambulance Trust.

I believe it provides a concise summary of the current issues and I would concur with its aims because through the Transport Minister the CTA have already raised the issue of Non-Emergency Patient Transport with the Health Minister on two separate occasions. Both times the CTA have been informed that this is a local issue.

Dear............. 

I am writing at request of members of Suffolk Community Transport, an umbrella group supporting the 19 individual community transport operators in the county. I have been tasked with making you aware of the extremely serious transport difficulties being encountered by patients who have been denied transport by the East of England ambulance call centre and have then been passed from “pillar to post”. As a result of the changes in the NHS transport policy more and more patients are turning to community transport operators for a solution. By the time they contact their local community transport operator, many patients are extremely distressed and far too often in tears at end of a phone. 

We are seeing a rapidly growing number of patients who are unable to get to hospital and are considering not attending appointments. Many have been advised, often rudely, by the call centre to use a taxi which is well beyond their means. The short term effect of this must surely be increased costs for NHS due to “no show" for appointments and in longer term a risk of more serious health problems to be dealt with as a result of earlier non attendance.

The manner in which the “Single Point of Assessment for Hospital Transport” has been developed and implemented has resulted in an enormous growth in demand on community transport. A level of demand which is outstripping the capacity of many of our members by placing unrealistic demands on volunteers.  

Our members fully understand and appreciate the need for the NHS to save money. They also realise that there have been patients who have abused the system by asking for, and being provided with, free transport when they were perfectly capable of making their own arrangements. We do not believe that open ended free transport is a solution but we really must find effective working solutions if we are to solve the problems. Unfortunately community transport in isolation cannot provide the solution to this serious and growing problem.

Therefore, Suffolk Community Transport is suggesting an early meeting in order to explore the problems that have been created. We would like to see if there is a way in which community transport in Suffolk can work effectively with NHS Suffolk to minimise and reduce the growing problem.

I would stress this is not a request for funding. Simply throwing money at the problems will not produce a workable solution. We have the vehicles, we have volunteers and we have commitment but we need co-operation in order to organise and manage the problem(s) as a whole.

This is not the first request we have made for a meeting with NHS representatives. Unfortunately, the previous approaches have been largely ignored, which has resulted in situation getting worse. This serious issue can not be left to continue to spiral out of control, as to put it bluntly the health of some the most vulnerable people in our society is being put at risk and a solution needs to be found as a matter of urgency.

We sincerely hope you share our concerns and agree to attend a meeting to discuss how we can work together to provide a positive solution to the issue.

Yours faithfully

John Phillips

(Trustee of Suffolk Community Transport)

Name a Bus - Win a holiday

Minibus World are family run specialist supplier of passenger vehicles to charities, schools, disabled groups and the care sector. They keep 4-17 seat minibuses in stock and also offer a bespoke conversion service where they will specially design a vehicle to suit individual needs, be it a mobile play centre, class room or wheelchair accessible vehicle.

They've asked me for no consideration at all to tell people about their competition to name their range of wheelchair accessible vehicles.

The competition is open to all employees, volunteers and service users, indeed anybody who has as an affiliation to a charity or would like to nominate a chosen charity is welcome to enter. You are free to enter as many times as you wish.

The prize for which is a 2 week all inclusive holiday abroad in the summer of 2013, and the charity you are involved with or wish to nominate will receive a 10% discount should they wish to purchase a vehicle from them in the future.

You can find the competition instructions here.

Health & Transport Connection

The forward to the Clinical Commissioner’s Guide to the Voluntary Sector says:

With the passing of the Health and Social Care Act in March 2012, the UK’s health and social care landscape entered a period of major transition. From 2013, newly-formed Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) will take over responsibility for commissioning many NHS services, and will face the challenge of securing improvements in health outcomes at a time when demographic shifts and changing lifestyles are putting ever-greater pressure on NHS finances.

In this context, non-traditional health and care service providers, such as voluntary and community organisations, social enterprises and mutuals, will play a key role, both in supporting commissioners to procure services that are responsive to patients’ needs and provide real value for money, and in the delivery of effective and innovative health and social care provision. Many organisations in the not-for-profit sector provide services which extend beyond traditional, clinical health interventions to a broader range of approaches, such as community support, social participation and support for independent living. 

A key attribute of these organisations, whether they operate at the local, regional or national level, is their close links to the beneficiary groups that they serve. Consequently, the voluntary and community sector is well-placed to support the development of tailored services which improve health outcomes and create a wider range of choices for commissioners, as well as service users.

The Suffolk Community Transport Association recently gave a briefing to the clinical commissioning group of the Suffolk Congress of Voluntary and Community Services that outlined the role of Community Transport in delivering health outcomes. The slide above is stating the bleedin' obvious that health access and transport must be factored into health service planning. Community Transport works in the scope of "market failure" where commercial operators won't. It has at least a £3:£1 financial return on investment (usually the public purse). However this message needs to be drummed home constantly and loudly to commissioners. There is simply no point spending millions on health prevention or treatment if the patients can't attend. 

Suffolk Sustainable Transport Forum Recruitment Event

Suffolk Sustainable Transport Forum Recruitment Event

8:30 - 12:30 Friday 9th November 2012

The Suffolk Sustainable Transport Forum was set up five years ago by business for business in order to disseminate information about sustainable transport and assist fellow businesses in adopting efficient and practical solutions. The forum is free to join and consciously free-form in order to promote networking and assistance. Since its founding the forum has grown and now encompasses other large organisations. Membership includes BT, The Port of Felixstowe, University Campus Suffolk and Ipswich Hospital.

Lord Deben (John Gummer), recently appointed Chairman of the UK's Climate Change Committee and former Minister for the Environment, will be making the keynote speech. Norman Baker MP Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport will be addressing the conference via video. Furthermore Heather McInroy Programme Director at the National Business Travel Network will be speaking as well as two more leading speakers to be confirmed.

We are grateful to our four principal sponsors - The East of England Co-op, Ipswich Building Society and Suffolk Chamber of Commerce. The Haven Gateway Partnership is also sponsoring the event and they will be available to discuss the innovative Low Carbon Freight Dividend project that provides cash incentives for modal shift amongst local SME’s. James Alexander of ‘The Main Ingredient’ will provide refreshments and the event will be facilitated by radio presenter Rachel Sloane.

The atrium of Endeavour House, the venue, will be full of stalls from some of the sponsors but also a number of leading green businesses with practical demonstrations.

All in all this exclusive event, places will be limited to 75, will be one to enjoy and remember. If you would like to attend please R.S.V.P. to Sharon Payne of Fresh Ways to Work on 01473 265090, or e-mail sharon.payne@suffolk.gov.uk by 26^th October.

Yours sincerely

                                                                     

Cllr Mark Bee                                                                           Andrew Cann

Leader Suffolk County Council                                                  Founding Member SSTF

Why can't we have a bus Betaville?

I was excited to read about Betaville, described as a collaborative online platform for proposals on urban design "in which ideas for new works of public art, architecture, urban design, and development can be shared, discussed, tweaked, and brought to maturity in context, and with the kind of broad participation people take for granted in open source software development..."

What communities also need is an application that displays their present bus, train and other public transport schedules and routes on a map that allows the user to also enter proposed or amended services to see potential overlaps and service and modal connections and the potential impact of timetable adjustment.

Such a tool will allow communities to design services for themselves with the aid of substantive modelling data. It can be achieved by integrating bus and train operators data (in the UK this is the NaPTAN database) onto maps with a simulation engine for vehicle movements and traffic factors, such as slowing from peak passenger loading, and overlays of proposed or amended routes via imported GPX data with inputs for actual and envisaged timetables, stops, distance, loading, revenue and cost calculations.

These capabilities are available in other open-source software so it seems to me (though I am no programmer) that what is needed is their integration. The drag and drop interface of Transport Tycoon or its open-source version Open TTD enables almost anyone to model a transport network. What is needed is the capability to play these games with real network data such as distance, stops, speed and so on.

screenshot of Open TDD

There are already demonstrations of live time-table simulation on the web. Here is a visualisation of the trains running from Norwich.

There is an open-source platform for train timetabling and planning called Open Track which can produce train schedule graphs from text timetables.

Software maker Zircon takes these train graphs a step further with a tool for visualising timetable conflicts in 3D. Their website has a video demo.

Train Graph

A tool with these kinds of capabilities combined could answer the many 'what if' questions in public transport route planning that - because of complexity - is in the UK determined by commercial operators and statutory tendering. Communities would be able to visualise and cost local public transport provision for themselves and enabled to lobby for services and amendments and analyse solutions such as community transport and DRT with data from this modelling. The capability to 'predict and provide' and consider service innovations will not be in the hands of a few transport commissioners and private operators but will also be where it belongs; with the users.

Then, rather than pitting every village, town and parish against each other for a better service from the network provider, transport planning can be made collaborative; as each stakeholder will be able to work together and see how services to meet their needs would impact others and so more efficiently and fairly distribute the limited resources of statutory, commercial and charitable transport operators.

Incidentally, I put this suggestion into the Ordnance Survey Geovation Challenge and at one time it was in third place but a social media campaign ensured another idea secured more votes on the final day.

https://challenge.geovation.org.uk/a/dtd/Our-Big-Bus-Train-Modelling-Data-Set/108489-16422

If you know of any existing transport modelling tools, I'd be glad for any signposting to them via the comments form.

Transport Tools

This week I was working at a parish 'visioning' day where a community is consulted by their councillors to hear the issues that concerns them and get opinions and ideas on the problems it faces. In such discussions with councillors and residents, many have questions about transport and traffic that can't be answered easily. 

For instance, in some recent work on hospital transport issues, I wanted to find the public transport journey times from each of the major hospitals in Suffolk to show which areas cannot practicably access a hospital by public transport. It would show where it might be sensible to prioritise community transport development. When I asked colleagues if such a tool existed, no one knew of any so when I did find something I think could do it, I thought should bring it everyone's attention.

mapumental.com

This mapping tool is by the very clever people at MySociety and it can interrogate the national train and bus timetables database NaPTAN and map a journey time to/from a given postcode to produce a contour map of journey times. So, for example, places near train stations show up as islands with shorter journey times than other places nearby.

You send them the postcodes you want mapped and they send it back. Each map costs £25. MySociety told me they can do other customised maps but this would cost considerably more.

I think this tool might be also be useful for seeing the footprint of accessibility to a town on market day and so useful for local transport development or town marketing.

There is another version of this kind of mapping made by Traveltime and you can sign up for a 14 day free trial to play with it. It has a different pricing model where you subscribe for unlimited maps for about £90 per month (which isn't quite practicable for me).

For example this map shows where you can drive in 30 minutes from the postcode NR33 8JA, near enough the centre* of Carlton Colville. *Where is the 'centre' of the community was a topic of some lengthy discussion.

If you need to find a postcode to start from, Doogal has a lot of handy tools to tell you what the postcode of a place is.

Mapumental has other mapping tools in beta trial. This one shows the places you can reach from NR33 8JA by 9 am with a journey time of 1.5 hours where the median house price is under £300,000. If the data can be trusted, this would be a house-hunters' dream.

Here I have pasted two maps together to see which areas of Suffolk are within 1.5 hours journey time on public transport to James Paget or Ipswich hospital. This evidence would seem to reinforce the complaint that Halesworth, Peasenhall, Saxmundham and Leiston are not well served. According to the Department for Transport; 21.1 % of people in rural Suffolk live more than 60 mins by public transport from hospital compared to 9.9% of rural England overall. Source: OCSI 2011 Department for Transport (DfT) 2009

There are 35 LSOAs (each averages a population of 5000 people) in Suffolk more than two hours travel time from a hospital by public transport.

This kind of problem was studied in a paper: Taking the bus: incorporating public transport timetable data into health care accessibility modelling by David Martin, Hannah Jordan, Paul Roderick. I don't have access to but you can read the abstract. The paper's findings "highlights the difficulty of combining conventional drive-time analysis with the discontinuous accessibility provided by public transport. There is a need for more attention to be paid to the incorporation of public transport in accessibility modelling."

Many communities want to know what are their commuter traffic patterns and the demand to reach certain destinations. The Office of National Statistics has a free CD called CommuterView which is an interactive tool which shows flows of commuters based on 2001 Census data. Once the CD is loaded, by selecting an area (local authority) of interest within the UK, the major flows of commutes within the area can be seen by moving the mouse. Patterns of flows and major areas of employment are clearly revealed.

You have to email better.info@ons.gov.uk to request a copy which I am told will be eventually be updated with the 2011 data. Suffolk ACRE have a copy if you need charts like these.

Last but not least, my good friends (professionally speaking) at Ito World who produce transport information maps have some great tools based on the Open Street Map where it is merged with other databases. You can see different layers to view:

• road speed limits in miles per hour.
• addressed residences and businesses.
• power generation routes with voltages.
• school distribution in an area.
• water types including rivers, reservoirs, canals and lakes.
• proposed and ongoing construction schemes.
• Disused and abandoned rail tracks.

The good thing about OSM is if you don't find the data you want, you can add it to the map yourself. I feel that data collection and auditing should be part of every parish plan.

Community Transport is vital service.

Source  Rural Services Network

DISCRETIONARY grants are vital to community transport schemes in rural areas, says a new report.

Community transport is growing despite funding challenges, says the Community Transport Association State of the Sector Report for England.

The document examines the size and scope of community transport – including insights into the differences between rural and urban community transport services.

It also includes case studies showing how community transport organisations are exploring new approaches to getting people out and about.

Examples detail the experiences of vulnerable, elderly and disabled people who cannot use regular public transport – and people in remote areas notserved by commercial bus operators.

Keith Halstead, chief executive of the CTA, said: "This report raises the profile of community transport, showing what it is and what it can achieve.

"It also provides evidence of the continued growth of the sector.

"In the face of today's tough challenges community transport organisations are exploring new ways of providing more services to more people." He added: "I urge local authorities to take a fresh look at what community transport can achieve."

There are at least 2,000 community transport organisations operating across England: nearly one-third of these are based in rural areas