Emergency medical personnel in the United Kingdom are people engaged in the provision of emergency medical services and include paramedics, emergency medical technicians and emergency care support workers. Although there is tendency for the public to refer to all ambulance staff as 'paramedics', the term is protected by law and strictly regulated by the Health Professions Council.
Emergency medical personnel most often work in an ambulance alongside another member of staff. Typically, an ambulance will be crewed by either a paramedic with another crew member (technician or emergency support worker), two technicians or a technician with an emergency support worker. No NHS ambulance trust in the country currently offers a paramedic on every ambulance, although some trusts are moving towards this.
The majority of emergency medical personnel are employed by the public ambulance services of the National Health Service, although many are also employed by private ambulance companies and the two voluntary aid societies (British Red Cross and St. John Ambulance), either providing private services such as event medical cover, or providing support to the NHS ambulance services under contract.
As part of a cost-saving exercise NHS is in the process of phasing out the ambulance technician/emergency medical technician (Band 4 on the Agenda for Change) role from the services and replacing it with the Emergency Care Support Worker or Emergency Care Assistant roles (Band 3 on the A4C), and most services are no longer training staff at technician level.
Read more about Emergency Medical Personnel In The United Kingdom: Levels of Staff, Road Traffic Collisions
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“In this country, you never pull the emergency brake, even when there is an emergency. It is imperative that the trains run on schedule.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self- opinionated.”
—Report by Personnel Officer at I.C.I., rejecting Mrs. Thatcher for a job in 1948.
“An inquiry about the attitude towards the release of so-called political prisoners. I should be very sorry to see the United States holding anyone in confinement on account of any opinion that that person might hold. It is a fundamental tenet of our institutions that people have a right to believe what they want to believe and hold such opinions as they want to hold without having to answer to anyone for their private opinion.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,—and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)