Mr. Martin Dunne:

The emergency medical technician staff operate the intermediate care vehicles. Their role is to do intermediate transfers between hospital facilities, nursing homes, etc, which allows the emergency ambulances to perform their core function, namely responding to emergency calls. There are paramedics on board, approximately 1,100, along with advanced paramedics. There are licensed call takers and dispatchers in the control centres across the country.

The control centre in Townsend Street, Dublin, will move to a new state-of-the-art command and control centre in Tallaght by the end of January 2015. Tallaght will then be the main hub for five eighths of the country while Ballyshannon will deal with the remaining three eighths. The reason for the selection of this model is based on international best practice. We found it is better to have a live robust model for resilience all the time. For example, the UK has one control centre for an area. The problem we found with that is that in the event of a breakdown in services, it can take several minutes to get a resilience centre up. Accordingly, we have two centres which will be fully staffed.

The state-of-the-art building has been specifically designed for the job it must do. Much time went in to ensure it does what it is supposed to do. It can operate for four days on its own electricity generation. The building has a command and control centre, the national ambulance training college and NAS administration. It is classed as a level three data centre with the amount of data connectivity it has and the resilience built around it in the case of any breakdown. At any stage, as Ms Laverne McGuinness said, committee members are welcome to see the building.

There is an educational and competency assurance plan for ambulance staff which has been in place for the past three years. It will be updated again in 2015. This will give operational staff members, the emergency medical technicians, paramedics, advanced paramedics and staff supervisors five days of training across the year at a minimum which includes ongoing cardiac revalidation, drug administration, etc., all required to ensure up-to-date competencies. Thirty staff are attending a joint HIQA and Institute of Healthcare Improvement-run course since the start of 2014. Up to 114 staff have completed the legal framework course across the HSE. Fourteen staff and managers are on personal development courses up to third level degree standard including masters degree level. We have put in support mechanisms for managers. A technical company of mechanical engineers is doing an independent review of the fleet and gives us support in the delivery of services as the vehicles are built to and maintained to a European normalisation standard.

The NAS is an associate member of the UK Association of Ambulance Chief Executives, AACE, which covers all ambulance services there. We share information on a regular basis and have technical support from it in operations for control centres.