11/06/2013 Look East - West

the programme tonight, and 999 call for the East Midlands ambulance

service after a scathing report indicates a lack of accountability

and a sense of helplessness. Flying the flag for the M11 corridor. She

went to hospital to get treatment for her skin condition. Within weeks

she was told her unborn baby would die. And we pay tribute to Sir Henry

Cecil, described by his colleagues as the best horse trainer the UK has

ever had. Good evening. The region's main ambulance service is facing a

major re-organisation tonight after a scathing report into its

performance. The report follows a dogged campaign by the region's MPs,

worried that the chaotic service was costing lives. The review found that

the East of England Ambulance Service has failed on every aspect

of the assessment. Here are some of the findings. The trust has made a

relatively simple job too difficult. It found there was a lack of

accountability and that the trust board hadn't listened. We will hear

from the author of the report after this from Andrew Sinclair. Behind

the report are the experience of hundreds of people who feel they

have been let down, like this family. Their baby was born

prematurely after his mother suffered potentially fatal

bleeding. Her husband had to drive her to hospital because the nearest

one was 25 miles away. He was begging on the phone to get an

ambulance. You want the expert medical help, not just getting to

hospital. You wanted someone to take over, didn't you? Yes. And this GP

in Suffolk who is seriously ill patients have sometimes faced

unacceptable delays. They called for an ambulance and anticipated the

waiting time would be eight minutes only to be told the ambulance had

been redirected and the next one was on its way from Ipswich, over 30

minutes. The report follows a year of controversy over response times.

It has become one of the main political issues of this region.

affirms many other concerns that I and many other MPs across the region

have been raising the several years now. We need to make sure that

unlike the 2011 report, this report results in a clear change. There

have been systemic failures of quality of care that has been

delivered to patients and it is time the ambulance service got behind a

new management. The report calls for a shake-up in the way management is

handled. There has been no clarity, no one taking responsibility and the

trust doesn't even seem to know how many staff it needs. The government

brought in this man to write the report to tell the trust where it is

going wrong, and now it knows. Dr Marsh who compiled the report, has

spent 27 years with the Ambulance Service and has been involved in

improving several around the country. Earlier tonight I asked if

the East of England Service was one of the worst he'd seen. It is

certainly one of the most challenged ambulance services but we need to be

clear the staff are working really hard, and as a consequence of their

professionalism we are already seeing some improvement. I am also

mindful that we need to do more and that is what I intend to do, to

support them and to share their commitment to bring about

improvement in standards. Concerns were brought about waiting times

several years ago, and now you have come in and it seems like within a

matter of days you have come up with ways to solve the problem so was the

previous team incompetent or helpless? Firstly there has been a

whole raft of competing by at ease which the trust needed to pay

attention to. I don't believe they paid enough attention to having

enough staff to respond to all of the 999 calls, particularly in the

rural communities. As a result of that, the staff felt unsupported and

there were insufficient numbers of paramedics to be able to deal with

the workload. What I set out in my report and recommendations is to

look at the organisation, to improve the efficiency of the way in which

the organisation is run, and to invest those savings into increasing

the number of paramedics and enhancing the number of paramedics

-- ambulances available. The staff morale is very low, who would want

to work there? Ambulance services have a good reputation for

recruiting people to go on to become graduate paramedics. I don't believe

that will be a problem. We need an action plan so that we can be proud

of East of England ambulance service again. There have been around three

so-called turnaround plans that have been put forward recently and all of

them have been announced to great fanfare, and they said they would be

the key to saving this service and yet you are saying they don't cut

it. Can we be assured in this region that your plan will make a

difference? Absolutely. The organisation have accepted my

report, and once they have implemented the recommendations this

plan will work. The report that I have set out, very clearly a set of

recommendations, the organisation has four weeks to submit their plan

and then I will help them to implement the action is set out in

that plan and I am determined to do that. You are right, there have been

a number of reviews conducted into the East of England ambulance

service but none of them have been as wide-ranging as the one I have

been asked to conduct and none of them have been lead on this scale by

a serving chief officer. And if you've got something to say about

today's ambulance service report, do get in touch. We'd like to hear your

experiences, good and bad. You can contact us in the usual way.

Remember to leave a contact telephone number.

This part of the world has Silicon Fen, London has Silicon Roundabout -

two of the country's leading high tech clusters at either end of

what's called the London Stansted Cambridge Corridor. Today business

leaders met to encourage more science technology and innovation

along its route. The structure of the human gene --

gene known discovered in the 1950s, and fibre optics are now across the

globe, but they were invented in Harlow in Essex. Some technological

breakthroughs in this corridor linking Peterborough, Cambridge and

London, and today there was a conference to encourage more

innovation. We are giving more powers to areas that previously had

been tied up in Westminster and Whitehall, and saying if you have

got good ideas, if you can think of ways in which you could make your

area is even more successful, we will transfer the resources to be

able to do that. They are leaders from across the region. The region

benefits from 65% of the UK's research and development money.

Stansted is now working to double its passenger to 35 million a year.

Hopefully we can bring the roots to Stansted and therefore over time

people will start to use them and that creates this momentum of

growth. King's Cross is going through a massive redevelopment and

that is what companies along the corridor are calling for, better

infrastructure and improvements to the road and rail, which will

attract more businesses and bring growth, they say. It is really

important we join up with London because Cambridge has such a lot of

depth to offer. We are all trying to grow the economy in the UK and if

Cambridge can help that would be ideal. Today was about better links

between London and Cambridge, with a world leading university and

high-tech cluster. A woman from Cambridgeshire had to

take the decision to terminate her pregnancy because the treatment

she'd been given for acne meant her daughter wouldn't have survived

after birth. Sarah Sharma was given Isotretinoin, which is not suitable

for expectant women. In the UK there are no specific regulations

governing the prescription of this medication. At 21 weeks pregnant,

Sarah Sharma had to deliver her dead baby. Now she's warning others about

the drug's dangers. It was soon after marriage that

Sarah Sharma and her husband looked forward to their future together,

one day perhaps starting a family. At the time she was suffering from

acne so she was given Isotretinoin, a powerful drug used to treat severe

acne. It should never be given to expectant mothers. Within weeks she

became ill, unbeknown to her she was already expecting a girl. When did

you realise there may be a complication? At the 20 week scan we

went for routine anomaly scan, we found out we were having a little

girl. Then the specialist advised they had seen a complication with

the baby's brains. She had a lot of fluid in the brain and the prognosis

they gave was that she would never child and life now has a new

meaning. If just one person can avoid the pain and the stress and

trauma and heartache of everything we have been through, then it is

worth its weight in gold because I wouldn't wish anything like this on

anyone. Woman -- Sarah Sharma hopes her raw deal will help to raise

questions... New CCTV pictures have been released

in connection with the murder of Jordan Maguire in Luton. The

20--year-old was stabbed to death on the Marsh Farm estate on the 26th

May. The footage shows a man in the Nisa convenience store on the estate

on the day of the murder. Officers believe he is the same man seen

pushing a bike on other CCTV footage.

This footage is early on in the afternoon, at about five o'clock.

The murder tragically happened three hours later so this gentleman has

been in and around the state during the course of the afternoon. If

people have seen him out them to ring the police and let us know.

A verdict of accidental death was recorded today at the inquest into

the death of a Honda test driver killed at a leading testing ground.

David Allen died at the Millbrook proving ground in July last year. He

was a "highly skilled talented driver" but the inquest heard that

excess speed was the most likely cause of the accident.

Six police officers who tackled a nightclub brawl are being

investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. A

student and two door staff were arrested outside Element's nightclub