• Question: what ambulance vehicles do you drive

    Asked by much11she on 31 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Kate Knowles

      Kate Knowles answered on 31 Mar 2023:


      I don’t. You have to be a specially trained ambulance driver to drive ambulances and then even more training to drive the emergency vehicles (the blue light calls)

    • Photo: Laurence Quirk

      Laurence Quirk answered on 31 Mar 2023:


      I don’t but I did get to ride in two ambulances last year because I was poorly. One of them even had the siren and blue lights. The paramedics were lovely and even gave me a sweet.

      if you’re interested in driving ambulances then there are different jobs you can do. You might drive one which offers patient transport to help patients get to hospital appointments. Or you might train as a paramedic and you get to drive the emergency patients as well as treating people who are seriously unwell.

    • Photo: Sarah Chalmers-Page

      Sarah Chalmers-Page answered on 3 Apr 2023:


      Very few of us get a chance to drive ambulances. There are roughly 17000 paramedics in the UK – out of 1.3 million NHS workers – and it is a very specialist skill. I got to be “third person” in an ambulance in my management training, which meant I was allowed to sit in an ambulance for the day and see what they did (and NOT TOUCH ANYTHING – they were very clear about that!). That’s as close as I have come.

    • Photo: Caroline Hatton

      Caroline Hatton answered on 4 Apr 2023:


      Like the others who have answered I don’t drive ambulances, however within our organisation we have the “out of hours” service which do home visits for very poorly patients when the GP surgeries are closed. Our dedicated drivers have company 4x4s as we live in a very rural area so need to be able to go to all sorts of places and sometimes off road. They drive our doctors and nurses along with all the needed medical equipment including oxygen, so we have specialist safety requirements and special insurance to make sure our staff are safe.

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