Shared knowledge and best practice results in a better more effective service By Kjeld Brogaard, Deputy CEO, Medical Services

With our tag of global provider of emergency ambulance service comes an enormous responsibility of developing our services in the UK to fit in and utilise our common purpose – we are all about people helping people.   We like what we see in the UK and believe we can add value to make it even better.

When Falck EMS UK became the majority shareholder of Medical Services Ltd (MSL) in August this year it meant that MSL would became part of the global Falck family and also one of the world’s biggest ambulance services.  When Falck decided to look into becoming a more active player in the very vibrant UK ambulance sector our research led us to Medical Services, who were already a well-liked and respected ambulance provider in the UK.

Our long term objective in the UK is to bring together the very best from Falck and Medical Services into an operation that will continue to provide clients with high quality patient care. The best and most obvious way of doing this is to share knowledge and best practice to enable us to reach this long term goal.

Falck, and now Medical Services, has been involved in new and innovative ways of treating patients, such as telemedicine, to further explore options that will save our clients money. In addition, the digital aspects of healthcare provision has had a very positive impact on emergency medical services everywhere and we need to stay abreast of new developments to enable us to apply them to our service in a way that will add value for clients and patients.

As a first step, we have rebranded the MSL frontline service as Falck First Response. This service sits very well within what we already offer clients globally and will benefit from a sharing of knowledge and resources across the service.

In addition, we will be introducing the UK market to Falck so that key stakeholders can better understand why we are so passionate about looking after people.

Who and what is Falck

We work for a common purpose – the people we care for. Our common aspiration across geographies, languages and culture is to provide relief and help our patients feel safe and secure. Furthermore, our values at Falck support our clear and common goal. We are accessible, competent, efficient, fast, helpful and reliable. All of which make up the foundation on which we can build our common future.

Globally Falck’s employees respond when accidents occur; they train people in taking care of themselves and the people around them; they fix cars that won’t run and they relieve pain of the body and soul. Thus, empathy and determination is part of all Falck employees’ DNA.

Falck bought its first ambulance in 1907, and began operating what was then the first automobile ambulance in Scandinavia. Today, Falck is the world’s largest international provider of emergency medical services.

Today Falck’s more than 2,300 ambulances respond to four million emergency calls each year: people who are critically ill, women in labour and accident victims. Falck also provides a large number of other prehospital services, including emergency helicopters and rapid response units with paramedics, nurses and doctors. We do it because we care.

New technology in the ambulances

We always apply the latest technology to help our employees help people in need and very much feeds into our common purpose.

At the turn of the millennium, Falck was among the first ambulance service providers to monitor ambulances using GPS and GIS. This gives the control centres much better information about the location and availability of the ambulances, which enables us to always direct the nearest available ambulance to an emergency location saving critical time as well as lives in the process.

In the UK we are rolling out the Traffilog system that is designed to improve driver habits and encourage crews to apply practices that will be beneficial to the patient and more cost effective in the long term. The Traffilog system will support our drive to be a greener, safer and more cost effective provider of patient transport in the UK.

We actively support the development of telemedicine, technology which allows our ambulance crews to transmit patient data from the vehicle to the waiting consultants and doctors in the hospital. We have also been involved in a study in Denmark which demonstrated that 3 out of 4 patients who were able to express an opinion would choose to have “medical music” played in the ambulance while being transported to hospital. Medical music has been applied successfully to 80 ambulances in Denmark and we are looking into doing the same here in the UK.

We work for a common purpose and aspire to provide relief to our patients deploying our values to deliver a high quality service to our clients.

For more information please go to www.medicalservicesuk.com and www.falck.com