Report Launch: Innovations in Health Tranpsort

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Today, the Community Transport Association (CTA) and Arriva Transport Solutions (ATSL) are launching our joint report, Innovations in Health Transport.

You can read the report in full  here.

What’s in the report?

Community transport plays a key role in getting people to and from medical appointments.  Across every city, town, and village, CTA’s members enable people to access healthcare services safely and comfortably.

Working alongside ATSL, CTA has looked at the provision of non-emergency patient transport (NEPT) and considered how innovations in NEPT could improve the quality and reliability of services.  In writing this report we interviewed a number of private, public, and third sector partners, who all work within this arena.

Within this report we highlight the actions needed by commissioners, transport providers, and our communities, to improve patient transport provision.  This report complements the report launched in March 2017 with Urban Transport Group, Total Transport: A Better Approach to Commissioning Non-Emergency Transport? Together they provide a vision of what we believe the future of our NEPT network could look like.

Why are CTA involved in this research?

NEPT is most successful where it draws on local knowledge and makes the most of resources that already exist within communities.  To make these local systems function more successfully we believe the NHS needs to adopt a more innovative approach to provision and commissioning.

The involvement of charities providing transport has been a long-standing benefit to the health service and patients. CTA’s own State of the Sector research has consistently shown that journeys into health settings are the second most common reason given for using community transport. Whilst this is valued enormously by their passengers, much is currently unrecognised by the institutions that benefit and is therefore insufficiently integrated with their own provision.

Through this report we have brought to life the lessons from community transport on accessibility, inclusivity and relationships with passengers and considered how these can be applied to the wider transport network.

The NHS is fundamental to the health and wellbeing of individuals and our communities. It is time to work creatively and collaboratively to improve the range and quality of transport services so that fewer people face barriers to accessing the care they need and deserve. We hope that this report is a useful tool for guiding this work.

What’s next?

The report makes a range of recommendations for transport providers and transport commissioners.  If you work in this field, we want to hear from you, and find ways to work together to implement some of the recommendations.

If anything strikes a chord with what you are trying to achieve through your role and activities then please get in touch.

Email: hello@ctauk.org