Excellence in Patient Care SA Ambulance Service Ambulance Transport Assist COVID

SA Ambulance Service

Team: Les Drayton

Ambulance Transport Assist COVID (ATAC) was implemented to combat the rising positive COVID patients within the community of SA and to reduce the use of Stretcher Fleet. The opening of the SA borders at the end of 2021 was going to increase our COVID cases here in SA. With this it was going to put extra strain on the Ambulance Service and SA Health. The request to implement a COVID Transport within SAAS was put forward to ease the workload on an already stretched service.

This project had a huge impact on easing the stretcher bearing Ambulances with them not being tasked to stable COVID patients that still required secured escorted transport around the state of SA. This allowed our ambulance operational crews to be tasked to higher level care taskings.

A work group was formed to work on solutions to combat the rise in COVID cases expected to make a huge impact in SA when the borders opened. Within three weeks, ATAC was operational. SAAS engaged Flinders University students to undertake the driver/ clinician role, an ambulance station was identified to dispatch from, vehicles organised including installation of MDTs, radios, pagers and mobile phones. Also, within these three weeks, the students were trained for driving a SAAS vehicle, PPE and general operations. ATAC commenced on 13 December 2021.