Patient Transport: Moving Forward
People who need help getting to hospital appointments just want to know how long they have to wait for patient transport. Read more of our key findings in our latest report.
People had told us that they were experiencing difficulties in accessing Patient Transport Services (PTS) for travel to non-urgent health appointments.
We consulted with members of the public in the period November to December 2014 in a number of different ways to try and gather a wide range of views on the topic of Patient Transport.
Our key findings:
- The majority of regular service users are satisfied or happy with the service offered by all providers and reported that transport services get them to where they need to be at the right time.
- Several of the people we spoke to who use Patient Transport Services (PTS) are confused about what is or isn’t classed as PTS, and they may not necessarily know which firm is responsible for transporting them.
- Many of the people we spoke to, especially those waiting in the discharge lounge, think they are experiencing a long wait for transport when they may also be waiting for other things, such as medicines.
- Satisfaction with information and communication varies depending on the company used. A higher percentage of users who knew which provider they travelled with that day rated City Taxis communication as excellent when compared to other companies.
- Only 27% of people we spoke to stated that they would have been able to find an alternative method of getting to their appointment if patient transport was not available.
- While the majority of people rated the helpfulness of their driver as good or excellent (83%) we did observe some practices which could be improved e.g. people being moved without warning, people being spoken about rather than to
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