Stand2 Secures New Three-Year Contract with London Ambulance Service NHS Trust

Stand2 has been awarded a new three-year contract to deliver Conflict Resolution and Clinically Related Challenging Behaviour Training to London Ambulance Service NHS Trust.

The contract extends a partnership that began in 2010 - and it does something more than renew a business relationship. It confirms what over two decades of uninterrupted ambulance sector delivery has already established: that when it comes to conflict resolution training for ambulance services, Stand2 is the provider the sector trusts.

What This Contract Represents

London Ambulance Service is the busiest ambulance trust in the UK. It serves a population of nearly nine million people, responds to more than two million calls a year, and employs over 8,400 staff - approximately 6,000 of whom are patient-facing. Training that workforce in conflict resolution and clinically related challenging behaviour is not a simple undertaking. It requires a provider with the capacity to deliver at scale, the clinical credibility to build programmes that ambulance professionals actually respect, and the operational experience to understand what those staff face when they arrive at a scene.

Stand2 has been that provider for LAS since 2010. The new contract, running to May 2029, will see Stand2 deliver training to approximately 5,500 to 6,000 patient-facing staff - covering new recruit induction through full-day programmes, and maintaining competency across the wider workforce through a rolling three-year refresher cycle. Delivery takes place at LAS's Brentside and Dockside Training Centres by Stand2's team of specialist conflict resolution instructors.

Ambulance services do not renew contracts with the same provider across multiple cycles unless the training is working. This is Stand2's third successive contract with LAS. That is the strongest endorsement available in this sector.

Over Two Decades of Ambulance Sector Specialism

Stand2 began delivering conflict management and personal safety training to ambulance services in 2003. That is not a recent pivot into a growing market. It is over twenty years of deliberate, sustained focus on a single sector - building the knowledge, the relationships, the clinical oversight structures, and the operational understanding that only come from doing the same work, in the same environments, with the same kinds of people, year after year.

Today Stand2 holds active contracts with three of the fourteen UK ambulance trusts: London Ambulance Service, West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust - a relationship that has been continuous since 2003 - and South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust. Across those three trusts, Stand2 trains thousands of frontline ambulance staff every year.

No other conflict resolution training provider in the UK has built its reputation so specifically, or so deeply, in this sector. Generalist training companies deliver into ambulance services among many other sectors. Stand2 has made ambulance services a cornerstone of its work for over two decades. The difference is not cosmetic. It shapes everything - how programmes are designed, how scenarios are constructed, how instructors are developed, and how the training is received by the people who go through it.

Why Ambulance Service CRT Demands a Specialist

Conflict resolution training for ambulance staff cannot be lifted from a general workplace violence model and rebranded. The risk profile of pre-hospital care is unlike any other healthcare environment - and it is unlike any other working environment full stop.

Paramedics and emergency care assistants do not work in controlled environments. They arrive at scenes they have not been able to assess in advance - private homes, roadside incidents, crowded public spaces, confined vehicle interiors. They encounter patients who may be in acute medical crisis, mental health crisis, or severely intoxicated. They work in pairs, without the backup available to staff in hospital settings, and often at night, in unfamiliar locations, with incomplete information about what they are walking into.

And critically: the person they have come to help is sometimes the person who attacks them.

The Association of Ambulance Chief Executives reported 22,536 incidents of violence, aggression, and abuse against ambulance staff across UK ambulance services in 2024–25 - the highest figure ever recorded, up 15% on the previous year. Every day, at least 62 ambulance workers are attacked. The NHS Staff Survey published in March 2025 found that 38% of frontline operational ambulance staff had experienced physical violence at work in the previous 12 months. Female ambulance workers are three times more likely than the NHS average to be assaulted.

These figures describe the people Stand2 trains. Not an abstract workforce demographic - the specific individuals who attend Stand2's sessions at Brentside and Dockside, who go through the programmes, and who go back out to work the next shift.

Training designed for a general healthcare or public-facing environment does not adequately prepare staff for what those individuals face. Training designed specifically for pre-hospital care, built around the environments and scenarios that ambulance staff actually encounter, developed and refined over twenty years of continuous sector delivery - that is what makes the difference.

What Good Ambulance CRT Looks Like

Stand2's conflict resolution training for ambulance services is built around a principle-driven framework for managing conflict and aggression - one that equips staff not just with techniques, but with the understanding and judgement to apply those techniques under the conditions of real ambulance work.

For new recruits, the full-day programme progresses through dynamic risk assessment, communication and de-escalation under pressure, personal safety and breakaway skills, close-contact principles, and emergency control - all taught within the legal and ethical frameworks that govern the use of force in pre-hospital care, and all grounded in scenarios drawn from the LAS operational environment specifically.

For existing staff, a rolling refresher programme maintains competency across the wider workforce. Refresher training is not optional in Stand2's approach. The evidence on skill decay in physical and procedural tasks is clear: skills deteriorate significantly without regular practice, with the sharpest decline in the months immediately following initial training. A crew member trained two years ago who has not practised since is not the same as a crew member who trained last month. In ambulance services, that gap has real consequences.

Every physical element of Stand2's ambulance programmes is independently reviewed by a consultant in emergency medicine. Every programme is fully risk assessed by a NEBOSH-qualified practitioner. This is not a standard industry claim - it is a specific, verifiable commitment that reflects Stand2's understanding that ambulance staff are clinicians first, and that training which compromises patient safety or clinical practice is training that should not exist.

The Standard of Provider LAS Requires

Protecting ambulance staff from violence is not simply a welfare issue. It is a patient safety issue. A crew that has been assaulted is a crew that may be taken out of service. An ambulance that cannot respond is a patient who does not receive care.

For over fifteen years, London Ambulance Service has trusted Stand2 to deliver the training that helps its staff manage that risk. That trust has been renewed - for the third time - because the training delivers what ambulance staff need: not a compliance exercise, not a generic programme with the trust's logo on the slide deck, but specialist preparation built around the reality of pre-hospital care, delivered by people who have been doing exactly this work for longer than anyone else in the UK.

Stand2 has delivered specialist conflict management, personal safety, and physical intervention training to ambulance services, NHS trusts, probation services, and organisations across the UK and internationally for over 25 years. Our programmes are AIM accredited, independently medically reviewed, and built around the specific risks and environments of the sectors we serve.

Find out more about our training for ambulance services →