Vesuv Blog
Digitalization
Updated on
November 3, 2023
ARS Controls
As the true watchdog of health transport, the ARS ( Regional Health Agency ) is here to ensure that there are no failures regarding ambulance personnel, health transport vehicles, or the equipment used. The goal: ensure patient safety.
Download the report on sanctions in case of ARS control
We will therefore observe several types of controls:
Compliance Controls
This is the control carried out by the ARS teams to verify compliance with technical standards in order to issue the approval and for ambulance control. Inspections are carried out upon the presentation of the vehicle to the ARS before any service is initiated.
1: The Approval is a document issued by the prefecture indicating that you have the permission to operate as a health transport professional. Without this, it is impossible to legally perform this activity.
Unannounced Controls
As part of its mission "inspection control", the ARS can conduct unannounced vehicle inspections at any time, in collaboration with primary fund services, law enforcement, and other administrative services.
Technical Inspections
An ambulance must undergo a periodic technical inspection each year from its first year of operation or immediately if assigned to this usage after this period. Health transporters must then send the minutes of the annual technical visit to the ARS.
Controls by Law Enforcement
In addition to checking the documents concerning the vehicle and the driver, law enforcement is authorized to verify the compliance of the approval and the transport with medical prescriptions. Certain failures to comply with the approval requirements may then be subject to fines and/or sanctions.
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Sanctions in case of non-compliance.
In case of failure to comply with regulatory obligations regarding the approval, it can be withdrawn temporarily or without a time limit by a reasoned decision of the DGARS (Director General of the Regional Health Agency).
Overall, the non-compliance of ambulances and equipment can lead to two possible sanctions:
⛔️ Suspension of the approval
⛔️ Withdrawal of the approval.
Suspension of the Approval
Temporary sanction, the suspension of the approval temporarily makes it impossible to carry out health transport activities. The actual duration of this sanction varies and depends on the severity of the failures but also on the goodwill of the DGARS (Director General of the Regional Health Agency). Generally, this suspension can last from 1 to 6 months.
Withdrawal of the Approval
In cases of serious failure to comply with regulatory obligations regarding the approval, it can be withdrawn without a time limit by a reasoned decision of the DGARS (Director General of the Regional Health Agency).
In practical terms, this translates into the outright cessation of the activity without any time limit. To regain it, it will be necessary to redo the processes to obtain a new approval from the beginning.
Example of cases leading to the withdrawal of approval:
Failure to submit vehicles for inspection by the ARS. Keeping a vehicle in service without authorization. Lack of regular inspections on vehicles. Regularly expired, unchanged equipment, etc...
What solutions are there to comply with ARS constraints?
It is not always easy to stay up to date on the compliance of health vehicles, especially when the fleet of vehicles is large and verifications are still done on paper. The information is cumbersome to handle, sometimes incomplete or even simply absent.
1st solution: Paper processes
Use the paper format for your quality controls. Paper remains a viable solution to ensure the compliance of your vehicles. You print a sheet, operators perform the checks, they tick the boxes, they send you the quality controls in paper format, you recover the document and process the data on your Excel sheet.
It is simple to implement, but now imagine that you have to do this for each vehicle in your fleet, with each employee, every day, every week. It is time spent on recurring paperwork; it's purely administrative communication with no real added value.
2nd solution: Digital quality controls
A digital tool will allow ambulance drivers to report the execution of the controls carried out via a system of boxes to fill in and tick on their smartphones.
No more paper, no more processing; automatically receive sorted, dated, and processed information. You will only need to execute the corrections.
A problem with a vehicle? An alert is created.
Expired, defective, unusable equipment? An alert is created.
An ARS inspection? Share inspection history with a single click. An online tool can do this work for you.
This tool is VESUV, a collaborative application for monitoring vehicle procedures.
The application offers several features:
💻 The dématerialization of your paper procedures in the form of a digital checklist.
📩 The automatic real-time feedback of issues encountered on the vehicles.
📒 The traceability of inspections (where? when? how? by whom?).
👨🔧 Customizable and adaptable usage to your environment.
✅ Available on PC and Smartphone.
You have the opportunity to test the application for free for 30 days. So do not hesitate to make your own judgment on the effectiveness of this solution.
