The management of an NHS pilot scheme across the south east taking 111 ambulance response calls, has been damned as having “fundamental failures in governance”, according to a new independent review.

The chairman of South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAmb), Tony Thorne, resigned from his post today.

The independent review - undertaken by Deloitte into the service’s Red 3/Green 5 pilot scheme - looked specifically at the decision-making processes from transferring 111 calls over to 999 handling, and subsequent waiting times.

Deloitte said the SECAmb pilot scheme allowed up to 10 and 20-minute despatch times for Red 2 and Green 111 calls - a system used to categorise the caller’s urgency.

The report shows the trust did not look at the impact of the scheme on patients and breached NHS 111 Commissioning Standards by doing so - delaying times for despatching ambulances.

Additionally, the changes to the Red 2 clock start times were not in line with nationally agreed operating standards - which require a response time within eight minutes.

SECAmb has today (March 15) accepted  the governance surrounding the pilot was “inadequate”, and stated  “serious changes [need to be made] to the way matters of governance are managed and dealt with to make sure lessons are learnt and a lapse in governance of this sort does not happen again.”

The pilot scheme ran from December 20, 2014 to February 24, 2015. A clinically-led independent review is due to be concluded by June 2016.

A SECAmb spokesman said: “The trust welcomes and accepts the findings of the review in full.

“A joint recovery plan is being agreed with the trust’s commissioners and Monitor, its national regulator, to address concerns.

“We will publish the full findings of the independent patient impact review as soon as it is complete.

"However, in the preliminary work to date, no clear indications of patient harm have been identified.

“SECAmb would like to take this opportunity to reassure members of the public that the trust and its staff are, and always have been, committed to delivering a high level of patient care and service.”

The trust has appointed Sir Peter Dixon as the interim chairman - at Monitor’s request.

SECAmb chief executive Paul Sutton is currently taking mutually-agreed leave of absence, while the trust determines the appropriate actions to take.

SECAmb covers Kent, Surrey, Sussex and north-east Hampshire.

A copy of the report can be found here.