DELLA Cannings likes to call a spade a spade. Or, in her case, a chair a chair. Her new job title, she says, is not chair of the Yorkshire Ambulance Service. It’s chairman. “A chair is what you sit on.”

Yes, she’s back. The larger-than-life former chief constable, who ran North Yorkshire Police for four-and-a-half years before retiring in 2007, is the new non-executive head of the region’s ambulance service.

It’s a role she clearly relishes. She is supposed to do three and a half days a week, she says, shaking hands in a small, airless office at ambulance HQ in Wakefield. “But I think I managed five-and-a-half days last week.”

For three years now, she has been out of the limelight – “doing the garden”, as she puts it, at her home near Thirsk. The 57-year-old has kept her hand in with a few advisory roles – she’s Chair(man) of the Independent Advisory Panel of the Army Foundation College at Harrogate, deputy chair of a national body scrutinising the use of patient records, and a member of the Police Appeals Tribunal.

But the ambulance job is her first substantial role since she retired from the police.

Given the treatment she sometimes received in the media in that previous job, it must have taken courage to return to the public eye in such a high-profile position. She was North Yorkshire’s first woman chief constable – and the hostility occasionally directed at her sometimes bordered on sexism.

She is clearly proud of her record with the police. In her CV she says that she “turned around a potentially failing police force into a modernised and successful organisation” and that she “left having ensured that North Yorkshire is the safest place in England in which to live, work, do business and visit, having reduced crime by over 24 per cent and markedly increased detection rates”.

She lists other achievements – increasing the number of local police officers, introducing a single 0845 telephone number for contacting the police, bringing in the first police community support officers.

Her successor, Grahame Maxwell, stated publicly when he took over that he was “delighted” with the state the force was in, I tell her. “That was very generous of Grahame,” Mrs Cannings says.

Given all that, the headlines over episodes such as ‘showergate’ and the row over expensive command cars still rankle.

When I mention these, the first flash of irritation shows. “Forget what it says in the papers! You know how inaccurate they are,” she says.

She then proceeds to give a robust defence. As soon as she realised the shower she planned for her office was going to cost more than expected, she referred the matter to the Police Authority. “Their report was very clear. It says I was totally exonerated.”

As to the £500,000 spent on command cars – the Volvos and Land Rovers bought for senior officers in 2005 – the decision to buy those was taken two chief constables ahead of her, she says.

She is also touchy about the question of her health. It was widely reported that she retired from the police on health grounds. Not true, she says. She had served 32 years – more than long enough to qualify for her police pension – and felt the time was right to move on. Her decision to retire coincided with some health problems, but they weren’t the reason for her retirement.

And what were those health problems? She won’t say, insisting it’s a personal matter. “How would you like it if I asked you about your health?” Pressed, she will say only that it is a “life-shortening condition”.

She is clearly uncomfortable straying into such personal territory, and moves quickly on, stressing her health doesn’t in any way affect her ability to do her new job.

Ah, that new job.

It is an interesting move. But why the ambulance service? What does she think she can bring to her new job?

It’s very much a non-executive position, she says. Her job is to provide leadership, to chair the board, to contribute to setting the overall strategy, to hold the service and its management team to account and to raise issues and questions where she feels there is a need for improvement. The day-to-day, hands-on running of the service is very much down to the chief executive, Martyn Pritchard.

Yet she clearly believes her police experience will be valuable. She was a policewoman for 32 years. In that time, she often worked closely with the ambulance service, and with paramedics at the scene of accidents.

“And it’s another emergency service: the challenge of running a 24-hour-a-day service in a world where the public have extremely high expectations. Coming from a background which is about public service, I sit in this world quite comfortably.”

Her first two weeks on the job have been a steep learning curve, she admits. She has got through a stack of reading – she gestures with her hand to illustrate how thick the pile was – and she seems to be enjoying getting to grips with the issues.

It is an ambulance service not without problems. I point out that in March, it became one of a small number of health trusts across the country which had to have conditions placed on it – conditions that, according to the Care Quality Commission which grants licences to health trusts, went “right to the heart of basic health care”.

She corrects me swiftly. The Yorkshire Ambulance service had a condition placed on it, she says. Singular.

And what was the problem?

It was to do with response times. The target is to reach 75 per cent of category A emergencies – the most urgent and potentially life-threatening – in eight minutes. Yorkshire ambulances were not quite managing that, although they were only failing by an average of 20 seconds.

“That’s less time than it has taken for you to write that page,” she says, referring to my rapid note-taking.

Still, a target is a target – and in certain conditions, those few seconds could make all the difference. Which is why she is glad to report that things are improving. In the whole year to date, 76.6 per cent of emergencies have been reached within eight minutes – slightly ahead of target.

Probably the biggest issue facing the ambulance service in the years ahead, however – just as it will be the biggest issue facing other public services – will be spending cuts.

The public purse is being relentlessly squeezed. How will that affect Yorkshire’s ambulances?

It actually represents a big opportunity, she says – retaining her ability to surprise. There will be a real chance to examine the way the organisation does things, to maximise effectiveness.

When organisations talk about maximising effectiveness, they normally mean job cuts, I say. Is that what she means?

Not necessarily, she insists. “That’s not to say that there will be no job losses, but it is more about the shaping of the organisation.” That might involve relocation of staff into roles where they can have more effect. And it might also involve the ambulance trust working more closely with other organisations, including other health trusts.

There may, for example, be opportunities for ambulance staff to work with patients in their own homes, so as to keep them out of hospital. “After all, we’re out there already.”

It is early days yet, she says – but there are a raft of possibilities to explore.

There look to be interesting times ahead for Yorkshire’s ambulance service.


The Yorkshire Ambulance Service by numbers

• Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust (YAS) was formed on July 1, 2006 when the county’s three former services (Tees, East and North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire Metropolitan and South Yorkshire Ambulance Services) merged

• It covers almost 6,000 square miles, from isolated moors and dales to urban areas, coastline and inner cities

• The service employs more than 4,500 staff and provides 24-hour emergency and healthcare services to more than five million people

• It operates from 62 ambulance stations throughout the county and has two 999 communications centres at York and Wakefield

• The ambulance service receives an average of 1,900 urgent and emergency calls per day

• The Patient Transport Service makes 1.2 million journeys per year transporting patients to and from hospital and treatment centre appointments

• More than 2,600 volunteers make a vital contribution to the service

• As the ambulance service’s non-executive chairman, Mrs Cannings receives a remuneration – it’s not a salary, she stresses – of £20,896, for three and a half days a week.