The North East Hazardous Area Response Team (HART), part of the North East Ambulance Service (NEAS), received a major boost to its capacity in March with the official opening of the Service’s second contact centre and emergency planning facility in Monkton by the Rt Hon David Miliband MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.

The contact centre, which is built over 550 square meters of the overall site, is a mirror image of the primary control and contact centre at Ambulance headquarters at Newburn. Staff at the contact centre are responsible for taking 999 calls and dispatching ambulances across the North East. A&E crews are based at the building and it also houses the Hazardous Area Response Team (HART) and Emergency Planning Unit.

Substantial new command, communications and control resources have been developed and installed by Excelerate for the UK Ambulance Service’s growing fleet of Hazardous Area Response Team (HART) mobile incident command units known as MIRVs (Major Incident Response Vehicles).

Part of the Department of Health’s national HART programme, designed to support paramedics operating inside the ‘Hot Zone’ inner cordon of major he incidents (something the ambulance service was not equipped to do previously), the HART project has required advanced command, communications and coordination technologies to support paramedics in high-risk, high-pressure situations such as CBRN and USAR incidents.

A total of twelve HART teams will be operational by April 2011, and most are already in post. All teams have uniform sets of vehicles and equipment, comprising three vehicles including one forward command Mobile Incident Response Vehicle (MIRV) with satellite broadband and other sophisticated command and communications equipment.

The satellite network is managed in real-time from Excelerate’s Cardiff-based headquarters, to ensure that sufficient bandwidth is available to meet specific requirements at all times. RapidNet Private GSM can be generated by each command vehicle to maintain communications with field-based personnel at all times without requiring service from the main network providers. This will provide full telecoms capabilities in situations where either none exist or they are unavailable, and eliminates risking a repetition of the communications problems experienced following the 7/7 bombings.

Excelerate was heavily involved, working in close collaboration with the Department of Health, London Ambulance and other ambulance services, in the three-year design programme for the HART pilot command vehicle (which required highly robust communications and display technologies). It has also been involved in helping the training of HART personnel so that they get the best use out of their vehicles using the powerful technologies they contain.