Trust bosses clash over ‘car park care’

Ambulance service leaders have clashed with a large hospital trust for putting “pressure” on its crews to deliver “car park care” while patients wait to be admitted.

The row has even resulted in senior figures from one provider – University Hospitals Birmingham Foundation Trust – suggesting the West Midlands ambulance medical director was “compromising his registration” by resisting it, according to meeting minutes published last week as part of January’s board meeting papers. 

West Midlands Ambulance Service University Foundation Trust said it is battling pressure, chiefly from UHBFT, to allow “treatment of patients by [emergency department] staff in [the] rear of ambulance, or patients being treated in ED and put back on ambulance” after receiving initial treatment, such as catheterisation or infusion.

Minutes of the WMAS quality governance committee, reporting on one meeting between senior leaders about the issue, said: “UHB did challenge whether the WMAS medical director [Richard Steyn] is compromising his registration by not allowing them [ED staff] to provide care in the back of the ambulance.”

WMAS “should not be supporting the requests from the hospital to develop standard operating procedures and procedures for the treatment of patients in the ambulance”, according to the minutes published last month of a committee meeting that took place in November. 

Doing so, it said, risked “this [becoming] the ‘norm’ whereby the ambulances will be used as an additional cubicle and whilst doing this our patients are dying”.

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Source: HSJ, 5 February 2026