In healthcare, ambulances play a key role in how providers deal with emergency situations. But the vehicles themselves are subject to immense strain, with one year of ambulance service roughly equivalent to eight years of wear on a typical private vehicle.
South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS), which operates a 24/7 service in the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire, serves around 7 million people for emergency and non-emergency services.
It runs 279 frontline emergency 999 vehicles, stationed at 43 operational sites across Thames Valley and Hampshire. In addition to the emergency vehicles, SCAS also manages over 450 patient transport service vehicles, and it needs to maintain them all, which it does based on a 12-week schedule
“Our most critical patients need a response within seven minutes from the moment that the call is connected to our control room,” explains Mark Green, head of business information at SCAS. “We receive about 95,000 calls a month coming into our control room.
“We obviously need a reliable fleet to get to these patients and know the movements where they need to go. And what we’re noticing was that our vehicles, like any other vehicle on the road, were failing and breaking down on shifts.”
This brings significant challenges, both cost and operationally. Ambulances are expensive to build – around £200,000 to build on a 20-week timeline. Adding more crews and staff also isn’t a realistic solution, due to training, cost and competition.
Seeking another route
To improve uptime – and ultimately help more patients – SCAS started to look for ideas outside of the medical profession.
“We are part of the NHS, but if you take away the banner, we are at our heart a logistics company – but one with very special cargo,” explains SCAS senior management information analyst Vivienne Parsons, Senior Management Information Analyst at SCAS.
“We are always trying to find a way of getting the right resource to the patients, and to empower our paramedics when they get there.
“But resources in the NHS are tight. We have a limited number of vehicles and a limited number of staff, and we have a plan for how long our vehicles can operate for.”
“As they get older, they wear out more and more. So it became an open question as to whether we could use technology to help increase uptime.
“We had to think of something clever out of the box, because we don’t have anything else. We can’t throw loads of money at it, so we have to come up with weird projects. We want to get our crews out there as much as possible.”
To find a solution, SCAS looked at other industries where vehicle maintenance and uptime are vital to their operations, most notably airlines. Both are sectors where safety is central, and yet their roles involve handling mission-critical cargo in high-pressure situations. They spoke with Rolls-Royce, who lease jet engines to many airlines, about how they carry out real-time monitoring. But unfortunately, their solution wasn’t suitable.
This led SCAS to overhaul how it approached data – a challenge for any “logistics” company, let alone one dealing with saving human lives. Despite having access to a huge amount of data from engines and journeys, the wealth of diagnostic data streaming from modern vehicle systems remained largely untapped.
Parsons and her team spoke with GE and other partners, but found nobody had used telematics and engine data to monitor vehicle health, at least not in healthcare.
Ambulances use telematics to help locate drivers en route and to find the best available path, but now SCAS is using that data to monitor engines for maintenance, thanks to a partnership with Qlik and Ordnance Survey.
Mapping out the future
Ordnance Survey, the UK’s national mapping agency, has been charting the country since the 18th century and was already providing mapping and geolocation services to SCAS to support its call centre operations.
In March 2025, SCAS extended the partnership, bringing in data integration, analytics and AI company Qlik, and Differentia Consulting to develop a predictive maintenance model for its vehicles.
James Armstrong, geospatial consultant at OS, explains: “Ambulance services are already dedicated users of OS geospatial data, but it’s exciting to know that applying our data to this new model has great potential to improve the efficiency of the SCAS fleet, ultimately enhancing its ability to provide urgent care to those in need. It’s incredibly rewarding for OS to be part of this project and potentially help to apply it across other emergency services fleets longer term.”
The solution involved creating a gridded system to make the massive datasets manageable. Armstrong adds: “We broke that area down into grid squares in the same way you would look at British national grid squares, and then just averaged out the road conditions for those squares.”
Based on methodology learned from the aerospace industry, the raw data from OS mapping – specifically, the topographic and contextual data in the OS National Geographic Database – is then added to the telematics data taken from the engines.
The data being process is substantial, taken from both OS and Each ambulance two telematics trackers found on each ambulance: the engine tracker monitoring internals such as engine temperature and clutch usage, monitoring location, lights, and other electricals; and the cab tracker linked to the control room.
Parsons describes it as “about 32 million records for a month.” The data granularity increases during emergency responses: “We get the data every 30 seconds, up to every 10 seconds. The blue lights go on, the data comes quicker.”
Saving repairs, saving lives
The project is being carried out by 15 staff at the NHS Trust, whose main focus is analytics, including corporate, clinical, emergency services, and non-emergency services. With such a small team, having the right partners is key, says Parsons.
Initially, conversations took place before Covid about ways of improving fleet management, but the pandemic led to many other challenges for the NHS, so this took a backseat.
A new fleet director joining the trust helped get the project off the ground, but SCAS needed a technology partner to get things up and running.
“Qlik stepped up,” adds Parsons. “We’ve now got OS into Qlik Sense for analytics, and it is a more complete package than we maybe initially envisaged.
“The help we are being offered by working collaboratively with OS, Qlik and Differentia Consulting is amazing; they are a key part of our analytical journey, providing the insight and expertise that we do not have.”
Initially, the team focussed on a subset of data, rather than attempting to process all 90 sensor fields, in order to validate the approach.
“It’s going to be a long journey to master the whole thing,” adds Parson. We hope to have a scorecard through Qlik that actually gives recommendations. We have time to say, based on what this vehicle is currently going through, we think you should take that vehicle off the road now.”
Green adds: “We’ve been able to create a risk rule for each of our vehicles. This means we can identify an increased chance that the vehicle might fail over time. If we can identify these risks early, we can change our maintenance schedule and decrease the chances of a vehicle breaking down during a shift.”
This would reduce cost, but more importantly for SCAS, it could help improve the vital work that their teams do in the field, saving lives.
Though they are monitoring the vehicles closely, this isn’t about monitoring staff or the way they drive – a concern that was raised by some of the drivers when SCAS first implemented the sensors.
Instead, it is about helping people save more lives. “We do this because of the patient,” concludes Parsons. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the front line or in the control room, or doing analytics behind the scenes. What is important for the public is that we show up.”