Vesuv Blog
Protocols
Updated on
January 2, 2025
What is an ARS control?
An ARS (Regional Health Agency) control guarantees the compliance of sanitary vehicles, equipment, and ambulance personnel. These checks, whether scheduled or unexpected, ensure patient safety and adherence to regulatory standards.
Download the report on sanctions in the event of an ARS control
The ARS controls
As the true police of sanitary transport, the ARS (Regional Health Agency) is here to verify that there are no failures concerning the ambulance personnel, sanitary vehicles, or the equipment used. The goal: ensure patient safety.
We will therefore observe several types of controls:
Compliance controls
This is the control carried out by the teams of the ARS to verify compliance with technical standards for the purpose of issuing the approval and for the control of ambulances. Controls are performed 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 perform this activity.
Unexpected controls
As part of its mission "inspection control", the ARS can initiate unexpected controls of vehicles at any time, in collaboration with the primary health insurance funds, law enforcement, and other administrative services.
Technical controls
A ambulance must undergo a periodic technical inspection every year starting from its first year of circulation or immediately if it is designated for that use after this 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 transport with the medical prescription. Some breaches of the obligations of the approval are then subject to fines and/or sanctions.
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Sanctions in case of non-compliance.
In the event of a failure to comply with regulatory obligations related to the approval, it may be withdrawn temporarily or for an indefinite period by a reasoned decision of the DGARS (Director General of the Regional Health Agency).
Overall, non-compliance of ambulances and equipment can lead to two possible sanctions:
⛔️ Suspension of the approval.
⛔️ Withdrawal of the approval.
Suspension of the approval
A temporary sanction, the suspension of the approval temporarily makes it impossible to carry out sanitary transport activities. The effective duration of this sanction varies and depends on the severity of the breaches as well as the discretion 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 the event of a serious failure to comply with regulatory obligations related to the approval, it may be withdrawn without limitation of duration by a reasoned decision of the DGARS (Director General of the Regional Health Agency).
Concretely, this translates to the complete halt of the activity without any time limits. To recover it, it will be necessary to redo the procedures for obtaining an approval from the beginning.
Example of cases leading to withdrawal of the approval:
Non-submission of vehicles to the control of the ARS services. Keeping a vehicle in service without authorization. Absence of regular inspections on the vehicles. Equipment that is regularly expired, unchanged, etc...
What solutions to comply with ARS constraints?
It is not always easy to stay updated on the compliance of sanitary vehicles, especially when the fleet of vehicles is large and checks are still done on paper. The information can be cumbersome to handle, sometimes incomplete, or simply absent.
1st solution: Paper procedures
Use paper format for your quality checks. Paper remains a viable solution to ensure the compliance of your vehicles. You print a sheet, operators carry out the checks, they tick the boxes, they send the quality checks back to you in paper format, you receive the document and process the data on your Excel sheet.
It's easy to implement, but now imagine that 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 is purely administrative communication with no real added value.
2nd solution: Digital quality checks
A digital tool will allow paramedics/drivers to report the execution of checks performed via a system of checkboxes on their smartphones.
No more paper, no more processing, automatically receive sorted, dated, and processed information. You will only need to carry out the corrections.
Is there 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 allows you to do this work for you. This tool is VESUV, a collaborative application for tracking vehicle procedures.
The Vesuv application offers several features:
💻 The dématerialization of your paper procedures into a digital checklist.
📩 Automatic real-time reporting of issues encountered with vehicles.
📒 The traceability of checks (where? when? how? by whom?).
👨🔧 Customizable and adaptable usage to your environment.
✅ Available on all computer and smartphone browsers.
