Allenzi

I'd just like to add to this that if it ever comes to a time that a patients financial status comes between me and treating them then that will be the day I hand in my notice.

I honestly think that privatisation is a bad idea. The service that the ambulance service in the UK provides is currently one of the best in the world. The Commonwealth Fund voted the NHS the top health care organisation out of 11 western countries, and we spend less money per capita on health care than many of the other european countries.

Unfortunately my personal experience of privatisation has not been particularly positive. We have some Private Ambulance Providers in our area (same as most services in the UK), but they often don't carry as much equipment as the NHS vehicles, the staff often have less training and they are more difficult to monitor, in addition to this they are paid more than the NHS paramedics, out of our budget!

I think it'd be a great shame to lose our NHS!

Ha, as a northerner myself I find this question difficult to answer without offending my southern colleagues.

Read as: 'Fairy levels are reading off the chart'

There are so many I could tell you about, All crazy for different reasons. I remember one when I was a student when we picked this guy up who was just acting very strangely (later turned out to be drugs). He absconded from the ambulance and sprinted across a live dual carriageway, somehow not being taken out by any of the four lanes of traffic. He then walked into a parked car outside our station (The call was like 2 minutes away, first one of the shift). We ended up struggling to get him into the back of the vehicle so he didn't end up getting killed. He kept going from so viscously angry (so much so we were pinning having to pin him down on the stretcher) to chilled out every couple of minutes. We pressed our emergency buttons and another crew came to help us. We eventually got him into A&E between the five of us.

Its very strange but when you put the uniform on, its almost like a mental suit of armour. You feel that if someone is angry at you, they're not really angry at you per se, so much as the uniform, this makes it a whole lot easier to deal with if that makes sense?