© 2004 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, British Association for Accident & Emergency Medicine, & Faculty of Accident & Emergency Medicine
COMMENTARY
Ambulance service reform
"Reforming Emergency Care" and ambulance services
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr T P Judge
LifeFlight of Maine, PO Box 811, Bangor, ME 04401, USA; tjudge@ahs.emh.org
The call to action must be heeded, getting there is the real challenge
Keywords: ambulance service; health service reform
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Dr Robertson-Steel presents us with a call to action in transforming prehospital care called for in the government’s 2001 white paper "Reforming Emergency Care".1 Having laid out three underlying principles to guide the ambulance service response the author then outlines essentially three global strategies to meet the principles:
- linked if not national agreed standards for prioritisation of response;
- transforming the education and scope of practice of ambulance paramedics to more definitively assess and manage illness; and finally
- creating new networked partnerships between all providers of unscheduled care with core funding provided by a single source.
In articulating a vision of the future the author echoes work by Nicholl et al2 regarding the future of the ambulance services within the UK and rightly acknowledges the challenges of delivering ever more and improved services within a near static delivery structure and budget. Inexorable increases in demand, the probable inability
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