Northern Ireland Ambulance Service
The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS) is the ambulance service that serves the whole of Northern Ireland. As with other ambulance services in the United Kingdom, it does not charge its patients directly for its services, but instead receives funding through general taxation. It responds to medical emergencies in Northern Ireland with the 300 plus ambulance vehicles at its disposal. These 300 vehicles, includes mini-buses, ambulance officer's cars and some support vehicle's, RRV's and some accident and emergency ambulances.
The Service employs approximately 1,100 staff based across 57 stations & sub-stations, 2 Control Centres and a Regional Training Centre. It responds to approximately 120,000 emergency (999) calls per year with a combination of traditional emergency ambulances with two crew members, and Rapid Response Vehicles (RRVs) crewed by a single paramedic.
In addition to the emergency service, NIAS has a fleet of Patient Care Service vehicles which are used for more routine patient transport to/from hospital, inter-hospital patient transfers and increasingly for GP urgent admissions to hospital. Within the Patient Care Service there are both single-crewed 'sitting case' (minibus) vehicles as well as double-crewed 'intermediate care vehicles' (ICV) which carry a stretcher.
Read more about Northern Ireland Ambulance Service: History, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words northern ireland, northern, ireland and/or service:
“... in Northern Ireland, if you don’t have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness.”
—Bernadette Devlin (b. 1947)
“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“They call them the haunted shores, these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here, and sea fog, and eerie stories. That’s not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you. It’s just that people who live hereabouts are strangely aware of them.”
—Dodie Smith, and Lewis Allen. Roderick Fitzgerald (Ray Milland)
“A man’s real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an article of his faith. The last is never adopted. This it is that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does. And yet he clings anxiously to his creed, as to a straw, thinking that that does him good service because his sheet anchor does not drag.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)