Armed forces to ambulance service – new career, same values
Category: Recruitment
Publish date: 02/09/2020
EEAST provides 24/7 accident and emergency services in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk and answer more than one million calls each year. As well as treating and transporting patients who need urgent emergency care, we provide telephone triage to around 65,000 people a year with less serious illnesses or injuries. We also operate two hazardous area response teams (HART), which are specially trained to respond to high risk and complex situations, such as building collapses or hazmat incidents.
In addition to our 999 service, we provide non-emergency patient transport for people whose medical conditions or frailty means they’re unable to travel unaided to and from hospitals, treatment centres and other similar facilities. We also operate several commercial services, including our CallEEAST contact centre, event cover and first aid training.
We operate from 130 sites and our resources include:
- Over 4,000 staff and 1,500 volunteers
- 3 ambulance operations centres (Bedford, Chelmsford and Norwich)
- 387 frontline ambulances
- 178 rapid response vehicles
- 175 non-emergency ambulances
- 46 major incident/resilience vehicles
Why we’re recruiting Service leavers
We recognise that Service leavers offer great transferable skills and an aptitude for working in a dynamic and diverse environment, making them perfect for a role with EEAST.
We’re an armed-forces friendly organisation and pride ourselves on the support we offer to veterans and Service leavers. Over the past three years, we have:
• Appointed a senior manager and former Serviceman as our Armed Forces Champion to act as a point of contact for staff who need further information or support.
• Signed the Armed Forces Covenant, which is a public pledge to ensure that those who serve or who have served in the armed forces, and their families, are treated fairly.
• Become only the third ambulance trust to receive the prestigious Ministry of Defence Employer Recognition Scheme Gold award for the outstanding support we show to our armed forces staff.
• Become one of the first NHS trusts to sign up to the ‘Step into Health’ programme to encourage people from a military background, or their dependents, to embark on a new career in the NHS.
We appreciate that serving in the military develops core values such as teamwork, leadership and the ability to improvise in difficult circumstances, all of which are essential to working with the ambulance service.
We’re recruiting:
- Clinicians and apprentices to work in our frontline 999 emergency service
- Staff for our patient transport service
- Emergency call handlers
- People to fulfil support roles, such as make-ready operatives, vehicle technicians and roles in administration or finance
- Volunteer community first responders
You can find out more about the roles available by visiting www.eastamb.nhs.uk/join-the-team/
We offer:
- Respect
- Teamwork
- Training, development and career progression opportunities
- Occupational health and staff wellbeing services, including a dedicated wellbeing handbook for veterans and specialist support such as Trauma Risk Management (TRiM) courses
- NHS discounts
- Great roles and responsibilities
- Unsocial hours payments (dependent on role)
- Excellent paid holiday entitlement
- Entry into the NHS pension scheme
- The opportunity to become part of our close-knit team and #BeSeenInGreen
Case study
Mark Wibberley
“I joined the army in 1979 at the age of 18 and did 22 weeks basic training at the Guards Depot in Pirbright before I was posted to Hyde Park Barracks, Knightsbridge. A six-month riding course followed and after passing, I was posted to 1 Troop LG where I took part in ceremonial occasions mounted on a horse.
“I watched the Iranian embassy siege live from my seventh-floor accommodation, rode on Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding day in 1981 and was on guard when the relief guard was blown up in Hyde Park in July 1982. After this I was posted to our Motor Transport Section to ride a Triumph motorbike with a bomb jammer attached to follow the guard changes.
“I left in 1986 for three years and re-joined in 1989 when I was posted first to Windsor, then Germany, followed by the Gulf War as a load operator. I also served in Germany as the wall came down and in Bosnia in 1994, before leaving the army in 2004 with an MBE for services to the regiment.
“I went onto fulfil in various roles, including with Norfolk Police, before joining the ambulance service to work in the patient transport service. I was given support by the Trust to further my career, passing various exams to initially become an emergency care assistant before qualifying as an emergency medical technician.
“For the last year I have been working as a recruiting manager for Cambridge, Suffolk and Norfolk, while also keeping up my frontline ambulance skills. I really enjoy my role and am passionate about getting ex-forces personnel to join the East of England Ambulance Service. I would thoroughly recommend it and know from my own experience that it offers a very worthwhile second career.”