There are 11 ambulance services in England, providing emergency access to healthcare.

If you call for an emergency ambulance the calls are prioritised into:

  • Category A emergencies, which are immediately life-threatening
  • Category B or C emergencies, which are not life-threatening

The emergency control room decides what kind of response is needed and whether an ambulance is required. For all three types of emergency, they may send a rapid-response vehicle, crewed by a paramedic and equipped to provide treatment at the scene of an incident. Over the past five years the number of ambulance 999 calls has gone up by a third.

The NHS is also responsible for providing transport to get many patients to hospital for treatment. In many areas it is the ambulance trust that provides this service.

I am a journalist and author. I am a journalist at the UK edition of WIRED magazine. In 2015, my first book Freedom of Information: A Practical Guide for UK Journalists, was published. My second book Reed Hastings: Building Netflix, was published in March 2020. I created FOI Directory in 2012 and have maintained it in my spare time ever since.