Warwickshire Total Transport Fund Support

THE CHALLENGE

Warwickshire County Council were successful in their bid to the DfT for Total Transport Funding. The Total Transport Fund aims to support new approaches to achieving more effective and efficient transport provision through greater integration of resources across a range of organisations. We were asked to help deliver the projects identified.

The aim of the project in Warwickshire was to integrate voluntary car schemes and the health sector, to provide transport to non-emergency health care appointments.

SYSTRA’S ROLE

Further to an initial baseline analysis and feasibility study, we took the following three pilot projects into the delivery phase:

• Pilot Project 1 - A one-stop shop phone and webpage service for information on how to access appointments, signposting people to the most appropriate service provider.
• Pilot Project 2 - Volunteer recruitment campaign to help recruit more drivers to help existing demand for the service and to help with an increase in demand generated by the one-stop service.
• Pilot Project 3 - Pilot scheme in Warwick using the Warwickshire County Council’s in-house fleet in their downtime to transport patients to clinics en-masse.

We liaised and worked with all stakeholders including the County Council, voluntary car schemes, CCGs and non-emergency ambulance service, and GPs to deliver these pilot projects, and provided progress reports to the DfT highlighting the successes, opportunities, barriers, and suggestions on how the DfT can help to deliver better integration in future.

Overall the WTTF project has been successful at encouraging positive communication between Public health, Transport Operations and VCS’ and has involved joint working initiatives. The formation of steering groups to drive forward initiatives has helped strengthen this relationship between VCS’ and WCC Public Health/Transport Operations teams. A countywide marketing campaign has given rise to the profile of community transport in the County and has helped to raise the profile of transport as a whole across Warwickshire with a number of volunteer drivers being recruited and potential new passengers found.