Scottish Ambulance Service

Map of the five regional divisions within the Scottish Ambulance Service.

The Scottish Ambulance Service (Scottish Gaelic: Seirbheis Charbadan-eiridinn na h-Alba) is part of NHS Scotland, and serves all of Scotland. It is a Special Health Board funded directly by the Scottish Government Health Department.

The two main functions of the trust are the provision of a Paramedic accident and emergency service to respond to 999 calls and the Patient Transport Service (non-Emergency Service), which performs the role of taking patients to and from their hospital appointments, discharges from Hospital and non urgent transfers

Organisation

The national headquarters are in west side of Edinburgh and there are five divisions within the Service, namely:

Scottish Ambulance Service Divisions

Division	Covering	Area in Square Miles	Divisional HQ
North	Highlands, Western Isles, Grampian, Orkney, Shetland	15,607	Raigmore Gardens, Inverness, IV2 3UL
East Central	Fife, Forth Valley, Tayside	4,421	76 West School Road, Dundee, DD3 8PQ
West Central	Greater Glasgow, Lanarkshire	1,054	Range Road, Motherwell, ML1 2JE
South East	Edinburgh, Lothian and Borders	2,457	111 Oxgangs Road North, Edinburgh, EH14 1ED
South West	Argyll, Argyll islands, Clyde islands, Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway	6,670	Maryfield Road, Ayr, KA8 9DF

Two Mercedes-Benz Sprinter ambulances of the Scottish Ambulance Service

EC-135 G-SASA "Helimed 5" based at Glasgow City Heliport

Scottish Ambulance Service Air Ambulance G-SASA waiting at Fort William West End car park.

An SAS PRU (Paramedic Response Unit). A Ford Focus estate

Beech King Air in 2007

Patient Transport

The Patient Transport Service carries almost 1.6 million patients every year. This important service is provided so that patients who are physically or medically unfit to travel to hospital out-patient appointments by any other means can still make their appointments. The service also handles non-emergency admissions and discharges from Hospitals.

Patient Transport Vehicles are Staffed by Ambulance Care Assistants either double or single crewed depending on the patients needs. They are trained to look after patients during the journey to and from Hospital.

Air wing

The service has the only government-funded "Air Wing" in the UK, operated under contract by Gama Aviation. The fleet consists of two Eurocopter EC-135 helicopters (operated under sub-contract by Bond Air Services) and two Beechcraft B200C fixed-wing aircraft, which provide emergency response and transfers of patients to and from remote areas of Scotland. In 2009/10, the air wing flew 4,004 missions.

The aircraft based at Glasgow are regularly used by the UK's only Emergency Medical Retrieval Service. The Air wing was occasionally featured as part of the popular Channel 5 TV documentary series Highland Emergency.

Scottish Ambulance Service Air Wing

CAA Registration	Type	Based	Call sign
G-SASA*	Eurocopter EC-135 (T2+)	Glasgow City Heliport	Helimed 5
G-SASB*	Eurocopter EC-135 (T2+)	Inverness Airport	Helimed 2
G-SASC	Beechcraft B200C	Glasgow Airport	Gama xxx
G-SASD	Beechcraft B200C	Aberdeen Airport	Gama xxx

^{* G-SASA and G-SASB regularly swap operational base}

SORT

Special Operations Response Teams (SORT) have been set up in the North, East and West of Scotland to respond to major incidents including Nuclear, Chemical and Radiological ones. These teams have specially equipped vehicles with decontamination equipment on board.

EMDCs

The Scottish Ambulance Service operates three Emergency Medical Dispatch Centres (EMDC) which provide Command & Control and 999 Call Taking Facilities for the Service, these are located in Cardonald, South Queensferry and Inverness. These centres operate 24 hours per day 365 days per year. All requests for an Ambulance are prioritised using a piece of software called the Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System (AMPDS) and a Response is sent according to clinical need. Responses can be in the form of an Ambulance, a Paramedic Response Unit, a BASICS Doctor, an Ambulance Officer or a Community First Responder.

Training Academy

The Service has its own dedicated training academy within the campus of Glasgow Caledonian University. The facility has purpose built classrooms, lecture theatres, syndicate rooms and a clinical simulation area that recreates a 16 bed hospital ward and Accident & Emergency department allowing realistic interaction with other trainee healthcare professionals.

Prior to April 2011, the service used its own dedicated training college located at Barony Castle in Eddleston near Peebles. Set in 25 acres (100,000 m²) of formal gardens and woodlands, Barony was a residential training and conference centre with 78 bedrooms that allowed the service to carry out all its training in house.

Facts and figures

In 2010/11, the service:

• Responded to 649,076 accident and emergency incidents.
• Carried out 1,356,938 non-emergency patient journeys.
• Flew 3,774 air ambulance missions.
• The average response time to life-threatening calls throughout Scotland was 6.9 minutes.
• The service employs 4,328 staff, of whom 425 are in management and administration and 13 are board members.

Ambulance Livery

The ambulances have been painted white since the formation of the Scottish Ambulance Service. The ambulances originally carried a blue stripe of the sides with "Scottish Ambulance Service" in yellow lettering. The livery was changed to yellow fluorescent stripes sometime between 1986-92. The current livery with Battenburg markings was introduced in 2002.

See also

• Emergency Medical Retrieval Service
• NHS Scotland

External links

• Scottish Ambulance Service Official website