On 22 January 2026, East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) announced a £4 million investment to expand its Clinical Assessment Team (CAT), a virtual clinical expansion aimed at increasing ‘Hear and Treat’ assessments across South Derbyshire and the town of Swadlincote.
The funding will be used to recruit additional registered clinicians — senior nurses, paramedics and mental health specialists — and to upgrade triage systems in EMAS’s Emergency Operations Centres. The Clinical Assessment Team operates from EMAS control rooms (based regionally, including Nottingham and Lincoln) and provides remote clinical assessment and advice so that callers can be directed to the most appropriate care without an automatic ambulance dispatch.
This move follows action by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) on 30 July 2025, when the CQC served a Notice of Decision that suspended certain regulated activities at Swadlincote Station (including transport services, triage and remote medical advice) after finding ‘significant concerns’ about service users’ safety and breaches of five regulations. EMAS says the £4 million investment is intended in part to reduce ‘conveyance pressure’ and ambulance handover delays at regional receiving hospitals, including Royal Derby Hospital and Queen’s Hospital Burton.
According to BBC reporting and NHS data, EMAS’s Category 2 (emergency) response times in 2025 averaged well above the 18-minute national target (around 44 minutes), and the trust recorded some of the slowest Category 1 response times nationally. EMAS says recruitment will roll through spring 2026, with the new clinicians expected to be trained and operational in that timeframe to help crews remain available for the most serious emergencies.
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