Vesuv Blog
Protocols
Updated on
January 2, 2025
What is an ARS control?
An ARS (Regional Health Agency) control ensures the compliance of sanitary vehicles, equipment, and ambulance personnel. These checks, whether scheduled or unannounced, ensure the safety of patients and compliance with regulatory standards.
Download the report on sanctions in case of ARS control
ARS controls
As a true police force for sanitary transport, the ARS (Regional Health Agency) is here to verify that there are no failures regarding ambulance personnel, sanitary vehicles, or the equipment used. The goal: to ensure patient safety.
We will then observe several types of control:
Compliance controls
This is the control conducted by the ARS teams to verify compliance with technical standards in order to issue an approval and for the inspection of ambulances. These controls are carried out upon presentation of the vehicle to the ARS before any commissioning.
The approval is a document issued by the prefecture indicating that you have permission to operate as a sanitary transport professional. Without it, it is impossible to legally conduct 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 administration services.
Technical controls
An ambulance must undergo a periodic technical inspection every year from its first year of operation or immediately if it is assigned to this use after that period. Sanitary transporters must then send the report of the annual technical visit to the ARS.
Controls by law enforcement
Beyond checking the documents concerning the vehicle and the driver, law enforcement is authorized to verify the compliance of the approval and the transport against medical prescription. Some failures to comply with approval obligations may then incur 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 may be revoked temporarily or without limitation of duration by a justified decision from the DGARS (General Director of the Regional Health Agency).
Overall, non-compliance of ambulances and equipment may lead to two possible sanctions:
⛔️ Suspension of the approval.
⛔️ Revocation of the approval.
Suspension of the approval
Temporary sanction, suspension of the approval temporarily prevents the operation of the sanitary transport activity. The effective duration of this sanction varies and depends on the severity of the failures as well as the will of the DGARS (General Director of the Regional Health Agency). Generally, this suspension can last from 1 to 6 months.
Revocation of the approval
In case of serious failure to comply with regulatory obligations regarding the approval, it can be revoked without limitation of duration by a justified decision from the DGARS (General Director of the Regional Health Agency).
In practice, this translates to an outright stop of the activity without any time limit. To recover it, it will be necessary to go through the process of obtaining an approval from the beginning.
Example of cases leading to the revocation of the approval:
Failure to submit vehicles for inspection by the ARS. Keeping a vehicle in service without authorization. Lack of regular inspections on vehicles. Equipment that is regularly expired, unchanged, etc...
What solutions are available to meet ARS requirements?
It is not always easy to keep up with the compliance of sanitary vehicles, especially when the vehicle fleet is large and inspections are still done on paper. The information is heavy to process, sometimes incomplete or simply absent.
First solution: Paper procedures
Use paper format for your quality controls. Paper remains a viable solution to ensure the compliance of your vehicles. You print a sheet, the operators perform the checks, they check the boxes, they send you the quality controls in paper format, you retrieve the document and process the data on your Excel sheet.
It's easy to implement, but now imagine you have to do this for every vehicle in your fleet, with each employee, every day, every week. It's time spent on recurring paperwork, it's purely administrative communication with no real added value.
Second solution: Digitalized quality controls
A digital tool will allow ambulance personnel / drivers to report on their smartphone the execution of inspections conducted via a system of boxes to fill out and check.
No more paper, no more processing, automatically receive sorted, dated, and processed information. You will only need to carry out the corrections.
A problem with a vehicle? An alert is created.Expired, defective, unusable equipment? An alert is created.An ARS inspection? Share the 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 Vesuv application offers several features:
💻 The dematerialization of your paper procedures in the form of a digital checklist.
📩 The automatic and real-time reporting of problems encountered on vehicles.
📒 The traceability of inspections (where? when? how? by whom?).
👨🔧 Customizable and adaptable usage to your environment.
✅ Available on all computer and smartphone browsers.
