Matter of life and death AS BOTH an ambulance driver
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and regular reader of COMMERCIAL MOTOR I should like to comment on the article "A Matter of Life and Death".
I have been an ambulance driver for just over five years and in this time have been employed by the Scottish Ambulance Service, the London Ambulance Service and currently by the Herts Ambulance Brigade.
Never in Scotland or London did I call upon the services of the fire brigade—if they made an attendance they were invariably called by the Police. In Hertfordshire, however, things are very different. Whether the fact that the fire and ambulance services are combined has any bearing, I wouldn't like to say, but I have on several occasions requested the attendance of the fire brigade even though my colleague and I have succeeded in extricating trapped patients before the arrival of the machine.
Perhaps the fact that when the fire appliance arrives the crew will be friends and not a crowd of strangers helps subconsciously. If this is true then the answer is obviously, elsewhere, to have better liaison between the services.
To move to another subject it may be of general interest to readers to know that in my experience I can only recall one accident involving a heavy articulated lorry caused as a result of jack-knifing on a wet road; in most other cases it would appear that jack-knifing was the result of, rather than the cause of, an accident. B. S. BROWN St. Albans, Herts.