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Simon Featherstone

Simon Featherstone - Chief Executive

A Chartered Accountant, Simon has worked for an insurance company in Bermuda, an aviation company in Luton, building societies in Bristol and Sunderland, before going to work for the NHS in Scotland as Director of Finance and then joining City Health (Community & Mental Health) Trust in Newcastle in 1997.

From 1999, he was Chief Executive of the North East Ambulance Trust, following the merger of Northumbria and Durham County Ambulance Services. In 2006 the Teesside area of the Tees East & North Yorkshire Ambulance Service merged with the North East Ambulance Service.   Major challenges have included the harmonisation of the working practices and standards of the former services, achievement of successive Governments' modernisation agendas for improved response times, continuous development of the workforce's clinical skills and interventions and rigorous financial control.

He is very interested in whole-systems approaches to the reform of urgent care and aims to ensure the ambulance service plays its full part in the delivery of improvements for patients whether through Contact Centre, Accident & Emergency or non-urgent Patient Transport resources. With this in mind, his team joined forces with the NHS Pathways team to implement the latter's new evidence-based, consistent, cost-effective approach to patient assessment over the telephone, in the ambulance control room, in 2006 with a view to enabling the delivery of a Single-Point-of-Access to the wider urgent care system. This was achieved in the Durham & Darlington area in 2009 and the systems are now the foundation for the new '111' number which was implemented in Durham/Darlington in July 2010 and is to be rolled out throughout the North East from 2012.