Belfast
Belfast is a city in the United Kingdom, the capital city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast of Ireland. It is second-largest on the island of Ireland, it had a population of 333,871 as of 2015. By the early 19th century, Belfast became a major port, it played a key role in the Industrial Revolution, becoming the biggest linen-producer in the world, earning it the nickname "Linenopolis". By the time it was granted city status in 1888, it was a major centre of Irish linen production, tobacco-processing and rope-making. Shipbuilding was a key industry. Belfast as of 2019 has a major aerospace and missiles industry. Industrialisation and the inward migration it brought made Belfast Ireland's biggest city and it became the capital of Northern Ireland following the Partition of Ireland in 1922, its status as a global industrial centre ended in the decades after the Second World War of 1939–1945. Belfast suffered in the Troubles: in the 1970s and 1980s it was one of the world's most dangerous cities.
However, a survey conducted by a finance company and published in 2016 rated the city as one of the safest within the United Kingdom. Throughout the 21st century, the city has seen a sustained period of calm, free from the intense political violence of former years, has benefitted from substantial economic and commercial growth. Belfast remains a centre for industry, as well as for the arts, higher education and law, is the economic engine of Northern Ireland. Belfast is still a major port, with commercial and industrial docks, including the Harland and Wolff shipyard, dominating the Belfast Lough shoreline, it is served by two airports: George Best Belfast City Airport and Belfast International Airport 15 miles west of the city. The Globalization and World Cities Research Network listed Belfast as a Gamma global city in 2018; the name Belfast is derived from the Irish Béal Feirsde, spelt Béal Feirste. The word béal means "mouth" or "rivermouth" while feirsde/feirste is the genitive singular of fearsaid and refers to a sandbar or tidal ford across a river's mouth.
The name would thus translate as " mouth of the sandbar" or " mouth of the ford". This sandbar was formed at the confluence of two rivers at what is now Donegall Quay: the Lagan, which flows into Belfast Lough, its tributary the Farset; this area was the hub. The Irish name Béal Feirste is shared by a townland in County Mayo, whose name has been anglicised as Belfarsad. An alternative interpretation of the name is "mouth of of the sandbar", an allusion to the River Farset, which flows into the Lagan where the sandbar was located; this interpretation was favoured by John O'Donovan. It seems clear, that the river itself was named after the tidal crossing. In Ulster-Scots, the name of the city has been variously translated as Bilfawst, Bilfaust or Baelfawst, although "Belfast" is used. Although the county borough of Belfast was created when it was granted city status by Queen Victoria in 1888, the city continues to be viewed as straddling County Antrim and County Down; the site of Belfast has been occupied since the Bronze Age.
The Giant's Ring, a 5,000-year-old henge, is located near the city, the remains of Iron Age hill forts can still be seen in the surrounding hills. Belfast remained a small settlement of little importance during the Middle Ages. John de Courcy built a castle on what is now Castle Street in the city centre in the 12th century, but this was on a lesser scale and not as strategically important as Carrickfergus Castle to the north, built by de Courcy in 1177; the O'Neill clan had a presence in the area. In the 14th century, Cloinne Aodha Buidhe, descendants of Aodh Buidhe O'Neill, built Grey Castle at Castlereagh, now in the east of the city. Conn O'Neill of the Clannaboy O'Neills owned vast lands in the area and was the last inhabitant of Grey Castle, one remaining link being the Conn's Water river flowing through east Belfast. Belfast became a substantial settlement in the 17th century after being established as a town by Sir Arthur Chichester, it was settled by Protestant English and Scottish migrants at the time of the Plantation of Ulster.
In 1791, the Society of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast, after Henry Joy McCracken and other prominent Presbyterians from the city invited Theobald Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell to a meeting, after having read Tone's "Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland". Evidence of this period of Belfast's growth can still be seen in the oldest areas of the city, known as the Entries. Belfast blossomed as a commercial and industrial centre in the 18th and 19th centuries and became Ireland's pre-eminent industrial city. Industries thrived, including linen, rope-making, heavy engineering and shipbuilding, at the end of the 19th century, Belfast overtook Dublin as the largest city in Ireland; the Harland and Wolff shipyards became one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, employing up to 35,000 workers. In 1886 the city suffered intense riots over the issue of home rule. In 1920–22, Belfast became the capital of the new entity of Northern Ireland as the island of Ireland was partitioned.
The accompanying conflict cost up to 500 lives in Belfast, the bloodiest sectarian strife in the city until the Troubles of the late 1960s onwards. Belfas
Volcano
A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. Earth's volcanoes occur because its crust is broken into 17 major, rigid tectonic plates that float on a hotter, softer layer in its mantle. Therefore, on Earth, volcanoes are found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging, most are found underwater. For example, a mid-oceanic ridge, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has volcanoes caused by divergent tectonic plates whereas the Pacific Ring of Fire has volcanoes caused by convergent tectonic plates. Volcanoes can form where there is stretching and thinning of the crust's plates, e.g. in the East African Rift and the Wells Gray-Clearwater volcanic field and Rio Grande Rift in North America. This type of volcanism falls under the umbrella of "plate hypothesis" volcanism. Volcanism away from plate boundaries has been explained as mantle plumes; these so-called "hotspots", for example Hawaii, are postulated to arise from upwelling diapirs with magma from the core–mantle boundary, 3,000 km deep in the Earth.
Volcanoes are not created where two tectonic plates slide past one another. Erupting volcanoes can pose many hazards, not only in the immediate vicinity of the eruption. One such hazard is that volcanic ash can be a threat to aircraft, in particular those with jet engines where ash particles can be melted by the high operating temperature. Large eruptions can affect temperature as ash and droplets of sulfuric acid obscure the sun and cool the Earth's lower atmosphere. Volcanic winters have caused catastrophic famines; the word volcano is derived from the name of Vulcano, a volcanic island in the Aeolian Islands of Italy whose name in turn comes from Vulcan, the god of fire in Roman mythology. The study of volcanoes is sometimes spelled vulcanology. At the mid-oceanic ridges, two tectonic plates diverge from one another as new oceanic crust is formed by the cooling and solidifying of hot molten rock; because the crust is thin at these ridges due to the pull of the tectonic plates, the release of pressure leads to adiabatic expansion and the partial melting of the mantle, causing volcanism and creating new oceanic crust.
Most divergent plate boundaries are at the bottom of the oceans. Black smokers are evidence of this kind of volcanic activity. Where the mid-oceanic ridge is above sea-level, volcanic islands are formed. Subduction zones are places where two plates an oceanic plate and a continental plate, collide. In this case, the oceanic plate subducts, or submerges, under the continental plate, forming a deep ocean trench just offshore. In a process called flux melting, water released from the subducting plate lowers the melting temperature of the overlying mantle wedge, thus creating magma; this magma tends to be viscous because of its high silica content, so it does not attain the surface but cools and solidifies at depth. When it does reach the surface, however, a volcano is formed. Typical examples are the volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire. Hotspots are volcanic areas believed to be formed by mantle plumes, which are hypothesized to be columns of hot material rising from the core-mantle boundary in a fixed space that causes large-volume melting.
Because tectonic plates move across them, each volcano becomes dormant and is re-formed as the plate advances over the postulated plume. The Hawaiian Islands are said to have been formed in such a manner; this theory, has been doubted. The most common perception of a volcano is of a conical mountain, spewing lava and poisonous gases from a crater at its summit; the features of volcanoes are much more complicated and their structure and behavior depends on a number of factors. Some volcanoes have rugged peaks formed by lava domes rather than a summit crater while others have landscape features such as massive plateaus. Vents that issue volcanic material and gases can develop anywhere on the landform and may give rise to smaller cones such as Puʻu ʻŌʻō on a flank of Hawaii's Kīlauea. Other types of volcano include cryovolcanoes on some moons of Jupiter and Neptune. Active mud volcanoes tend to involve temperatures much lower than those of igneous volcanoes except when the mud volcano is a vent of an igneous volcano.
Volcanic fissure vents are linear fractures through which lava emerges. Shield volcanoes, so named for their broad, shield-like profiles, are formed by the eruption of low-viscosity lava that can flow a great distance from a vent, they do not explode catastrophically. Since low-viscosity magma is low in silica, shield volcanoes are more common in oceanic than continental settings; the Hawaiian volcanic chain is a series of shield cones, they are common in Iceland, as well. Lava domes are built by slow eruptions of viscous lava, they are sometimes formed within the crater of a previous volcanic eruption, as in the case of Mount Saint Helen
North Atlantic Igneous Province
The North Atlantic Igneous Province is a large igneous province in the North Atlantic, centered on Iceland. In the Paleogene, the province formed the Thulean Plateau, a large basaltic lava plain, which extended over at least 1.3×106 km2 in area and 6.6×106 km3 in volume. The plateau was broken up during the opening of the North Atlantic Ocean leaving remnants existing in Northern Ireland, bits of northwestern Scotland, the Faroe Islands, bits of northwestern Iceland, eastern Greenland and western Norway and many of the islands located in the north eastern portion of the North Atlantic Ocean; the igneous province is the origin of Fingal's Cave. The province is known as Brito-Arctic province and the portions of the province in the British Isles is called the British Tertiary Volcanic Province or British Tertiary Igneous Province. Isotopic dating indicates the most active magmatic phase of the NAIP was between ca. 60.5 and ca. 54.5 Ma - further divided into Phase 1 dated to ca. 62-58 Ma and Phase 2 dated to ca.
56-54 Ma. Continuing research indicates that continental plate movement, that regional rifting events, that seafloor spreading between Labrador and Greenland may have begun as early as ca. 95-80 Ma, ca. 81 Ma, ca. 63-61 Ma respectively. Studies have suggested that the modern day Iceland hotspot corresponds to the earlier'North Atlantic mantle plume' that would have created the NAIP. Through both geochemical observations and reconstructions of paleogeography, it is speculated that the present day Iceland hotspot originated as a mantle plume on the Alpha Ridge ca. 130-120 Ma, migrated down Ellesmere Island, through Baffin Island, onto the west coast of Greenland, arrived on the east coast of Greenland by ca. 60 Ma. Extensive outpourings of lava occurred in East Greenland, which during the Paleogene was adjacent to Britain. Little is known of the geodynamics of the opening of the North Atlantic between Greenland and Europe; as the earth's crust was stretched above the mantle hotspot under stress from plate rifting, fissures opened up along a line from Ireland to the Hebrides and plutonic complexes were formed.
Hot magma over 1000 °C surfaced as multiple and extensive lava flows covered over the original landscape, burning forests, filling river valleys, burying hills, to form the Thulean Plateau, which contained various volcanic landforms such as lava fields and volcanoes. There was more than one period of volcanic activity during the NAIP, in between which sea levels rose and fell and erosion took place. Volcanic activity would have started with volcaniclastic accumulations, like volcanic ash followed by vast outpourings of fluid basaltic lava during successive eruptions through multiple volcanic vents or in linear fissures; as mafic low viscosity lava reached the surface it cooled and solidified, successive flows built up layer upon layer, each time filling and covering existing landscapes. Hyaloclastites and pillow lavas were formed when the lava flowed into lakes and seas. Magma that did not make it to the surface as flows froze in conduits as dikes and volcanic plugs and large amounts spread laterally to form sills.
Dike swarms extended across the British Isles throughout the Cenozoic. Individual central complexes developed with arcuate intrusions, the intrusions of one centre cut through earlier centres recording magmatic activity with time. During intermittent periods of erosion and change in sea levels, heated waters circulated through the flows altering the basalts and deposited distinctive suites of zeolite minerals. Activity of the NAIP 55 million years ago may have caused the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, where a large amount of carbon was released into the atmosphere and the Earth warmed. One hypothesis is that the uplift caused by the NAIP hotspot caused methane clathrates to dissociate and dump 2000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere; the NAIP is made up of both onshore and offshore basalt floods, sills and plateaus. Dependent upon various regional locations, the NAIP is made up of MORB, alkali basalt, tholeiitic basalt, picrite basalt. Basaltic volcanic rocks up to 2.5 kilometres thick cover 65,000 square kilometres in east Greenland.
Numerous intrusions related to hot-spot magmatism are exposed in the coastal region of east Greenland. The intrusions show a wide range of compositions; the Skaergaard intrusion is a layered gabbro intrusion that has mineralized rock units enriched in palladium and gold. In contrast, the Werner Bjerge complex is made up of potassium- and sodium-rich granitic rock, containing molybdenum. Locations of submarine central complexes within the NAIP include Anton Dohrn Seamount Rosemary Bank Blackstones Bank Brendan Erlend The British portion of the NAIP West Scotland, provides easy access, compared to the inaccessible basalt fields of West Greenland, to eroded relics of the central volcanic complexes. Locations of major intrusion complexes within the British part of the NAIP include: Other notable locations with NAIP landforms within Britain: Giant's Causeway – Polygonal basalt columns, which seen from above are large hexagonal pavements Canna and Sanday – Basalt lava field with great thicknesses of boulder conglomerate, examples of periods of erosion by fast flowing rivers in between the lava flows.
Rathlin Island – Paleogene and Neogene lava f
Local government in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is divided into 11 districts for local government purposes. In Northern Ireland, local councils do not carry out the same range of functions as those in the rest of the United Kingdom, their functions include planning and recycling services and community services, building control and local economic and cultural development. The collection of rates is handled centrally by the Land and Property Services agency of the Northern Ireland Executive. Last updated 26 November 2017 The current pattern of 11 local government districts was established on 1 April 2015, as a result of the reform process that started in 2005; the previous pattern of local government in Northern Ireland, with 26 councils, was established in 1973 by the Local Government Act 1971 and the Local Government Act 1972 to replace the previous system established by the Local Government Act 1898. The system was based on the recommendations of the Macrory Report, of June 1970, which presupposed the continued existence of the Government of Northern Ireland to act as a regional-level authority.
From 1921 to 1973, Northern Ireland was divided into six administrative counties and two county boroughs. The counties and county boroughs continue to exist for the purposes of shrievalty; this system, with the abolition of rural districts, remains the model for local government in the Republic of Ireland. Councillors are elected for a four-year term of office under the single transferable vote system. Elections were last held in May 2014. To qualify for election, a councillor candidate must be: at least 18 years of age, a Commonwealth of Nations or European Union citizenIn addition, he or she must either: be a local elector for the district, or have, during the whole of the 12-month period prior to the election, either owned or occupied land in the district, or else resided or worked in the district The districts are combined for various purposes. In the Eurostat Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, Northern Ireland is divided into five parts at level 3 There were five education and library boards in Northern Ireland.
As part of the Review of Public Administration process, the library functions of the ELBs were taken over by a new body, the Northern Ireland Library Authority in April 2009. The education and skills functions were centralised into a single Education Authority for Northern Ireland in April 2015; the boards were as follows: There were four health and social services boards which were replaced by a single Health and Social Care Board in April 2009. The former health and social services boards were as follows: In June 2002, the Northern Ireland Executive established a Review of Public Administration to review the arrangements for the accountability, development and delivery of public services. Among its recommendations were a reduction in the number of districts. In 2005 Peter Hain, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, announced proposals to reduce the number of councils to seven; the names and boundaries of the seven districts were announced in March 2007. In March 2008 the restored Northern Executive agreed to create eleven new councils instead of the original seven.
The first elections were due to take place in May 2011. However, by May 2010 disagreements among parties in the executive over district boundaries were expected to delay the reforms until 2015. In June 2010 the proposed reforms were abandoned following the failure of the Northern Ireland Executive to reach agreement. However, on 12 March 2012, the Northern Ireland Executive published its programme for government, which included a commitment to reduce the number of councils in Northern Ireland to 11. List of districts in Northern Ireland by area List of districts in Northern Ireland by population density List of districts in Northern Ireland by religion or religion brought up in List of districts in Northern Ireland by national identity Political make-up of local councils in Northern Ireland ISO 3166-2:GB, subdivision codes for the United Kingdom Local government in England Local government in Scotland Local government in Wales Local government in the Republic of Ireland List of districts in Northern Ireland by national identity List of districts in Northern Ireland by population Local councils in Northern Ireland NI Direct NI Local Government Association Review of Public Administration NI Local Government Boundaries Commissioner for Northern Ireland Local Government DOE NI Macrory Report CAIN Web Service Local Government Act 1971 CAIN Web Service Northern Ireland Councillor's Handbook Local Government Staff Commission for Northern Ireland Map of all UK local authorities Office for National Statistics, 2009
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom in the north-east of the island of Ireland, variously described as a country, province or region. Northern Ireland shares a border to the west with the Republic of Ireland. In 2011, its population was 1,810,863, constituting about 30% of the island's total population and about 3% of the UK's population. Established by the Northern Ireland Act 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Assembly holds responsibility for a range of devolved policy matters, while other areas are reserved for the British government. Northern Ireland co-operates with the Republic of Ireland in some areas, the Agreement granted the Republic the ability to "put forward views and proposals" with "determined efforts to resolve disagreements between the two governments". Northern Ireland was created in 1921, when Ireland was partitioned between Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland by the Government of Ireland Act 1920. Unlike Southern Ireland, which would become the Irish Free State in 1922, the majority of Northern Ireland's population were unionists, who wanted to remain within the United Kingdom.
Most of these were the Protestant descendants of colonists from Great Britain. However, a significant minority Catholics, were nationalists who wanted a united Ireland independent of British rule. Today, the former see themselves as British and the latter see themselves as Irish, while a distinct Northern Irish or Ulster identity is claimed both by a large minority of Catholics and Protestants and by many of those who are non-aligned. For most of the 20th century, when it came into existence, Northern Ireland was marked by discrimination and hostility between these two sides in what First Minister of Northern Ireland, David Trimble, called a "cold house" for Catholics. In the late 1960s, conflict between state forces and chiefly Protestant unionists on the one hand, chiefly Catholic nationalists on the other, erupted into three decades of violence known as the Troubles, which claimed over 3,500 lives and caused over 50,000 casualties; the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was a major step in the peace process, including the decommissioning of weapons, although sectarianism and religious segregation still remain major social problems, sporadic violence has continued.
Northern Ireland has been the most industrialised region of Ireland. After declining as a result of the political and social turmoil of the Troubles, its economy has grown since the late 1990s; the initial growth came from the "peace dividend" and the links which increased trade with the Republic of Ireland, continuing with a significant increase in tourism and business from around the world. Unemployment in Northern Ireland peaked at 17.2% in 1986, dropping to 6.1% for June–August 2014 and down by 1.2 percentage points over the year, similar to the UK figure of 6.2%. 58.2% of those unemployed had been unemployed for over a year. Prominent artists and sportspeople from Northern Ireland include Van Morrison, Rory McIlroy, Joey Dunlop, Wayne McCullough and George Best; some people from Northern Ireland prefer to identify as Irish while others prefer to identify as British. Cultural links between Northern Ireland, the rest of Ireland, the rest of the UK are complex, with Northern Ireland sharing both the culture of Ireland and the culture of the United Kingdom.
In many sports, the island of Ireland fields a single team, a notable exception being association football. Northern Ireland competes separately at the Commonwealth Games, people from Northern Ireland may compete for either Great Britain or Ireland at the Olympic Games; the region, now Northern Ireland was the bedrock of the Irish war of resistance against English programmes of colonialism in the late 16th century. The English-controlled Kingdom of Ireland had been declared by the English king Henry VIII in 1542, but Irish resistance made English control fragmentary. Following Irish defeat at the Battle of Kinsale, the region's Gaelic, Roman Catholic aristocracy fled to continental Europe in 1607 and the region became subject to major programmes of colonialism by Protestant English and Scottish settlers. A rebellion in 1641 by Irish aristocrats against English rule resulted in a massacre of settlers in Ulster in the context of a war breaking out between England and Ireland fuelled by religious intolerance in government.
Victories by English forces in that war and further Protestant victories in the Williamite War in Ireland toward the close of the 17th century solidified Anglican rule in Ireland. In Northern Ireland, the victories of the Siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne in this latter war are still celebrated by some Protestants. Popes Innocent XI and Alexander VIII had supported William of Orange instead of his maternal uncle and father-in-law James II, despite William being Protestant and James a Catholic, due to William's participation in alliance with both Protesant and Catholic powers in Europe in wars against Louis XIV, the powerful King of France, in conflict with the papacy for decades. In 1693, Pope Innocent XII recognised James as continuing King of Great Britain and Ireland in place of William, after reconciliation with Louis. In 1695, contrary to the terms of the Treaty of Limerick, a series of penal laws were passed by the Anglican ruling class in Ireland in intense anger at the Pope's recognition of James over William, felt to be a betrayal.
The intention of the la
Northern Ireland Ambulance Service
The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service Health and Social Care Trust is an 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. Its fleet includes mini-buses, ambulance officers' cars, support vehicles, RRVs and accident and emergency ambulances; the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service was formed on 1 April 1995 through the amalgamation of its 4 predecessors. Its full title is Social Care Trust; the Service employs 1,300 staff of which 420 are Paramedics, 300 are EMTs and 100 are Control staff, which work shift patterns to ensure the service is operational 24/7. They are based across 46 stations & sub-stations, 2 Control Centres and a Regional Ambulance Training Centre, it responds to 201,000 emergency calls per year with a combination of traditional emergency ambulances with two crew members, rapid response vehicles crewed by a single paramedic.
RRV's respond to calls where there is a potential immediate life-threat because they can respond more than a conventional ambulance. Double-crew ambulances respond to both Emergency and Non-emergency calls as well as providing critical-care transfers between hospitals; the Trust aims to provide at least one Paramedic to every emergency call by staffing each double-crew, emergency ambulance with two Paramedics or a Paramedic and an Emergency Medical Technician and utilising Rapid Response Vehicles. The Trust has not adopted the controversial use of ECA's in the way many other UK Ambulance Services have. In Northern Ireland there is no training programme in any Northern Ireland Universities to train Paramedics. 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. Within the Patient Care Service there are both single-crewed'sitting case' vehicles as well as double-crewed'intermediate care vehicles' which carry a stretcher.
In 2016 NIAS was commissioned to provide a Helicopter Emergency Medical Service for the first time in Northern Ireland, by the only region of the UK not to have one. Following a public consultation, they partnered with the charity Air Ambulance Northern Ireland who provide the aircraft and airbase, with the doctors and paramedics provided by NIAS; the service undertook its first live mission in August 2017. NIAS has a target time of 8 minutes to reach the scene of an emergency although, during December 2017 only 47.5% of this target was met therefore the average response time in Northern Ireland was 16 minutes 10 seconds. The trust works with volunteer and private ambulance services to help cope and meet key response times, this is due to the current increased demand and squeeze on public spending across Northern Ireland Staff have expressed concern by the growing pressures they face and overall low moral across the service; the ambulance service aims to restructure the service to cope with future increased demand.
In September 2018 the ambulance service ask the Department of Health for an additional £30 million to restructure and to recruit an additional 300 staff of which include Paramedics, EMT's and Emergency call takers. The recruitment is hoped to increase response times, relieve pressure on staff and get to the sickest quickest. Emergency medical services in the United Kingdom National Health Service List of Government departments and agencies in Northern Ireland HSE National Ambulance Service – Ambulance service in the Republic of Ireland Official website
Emergency medical services in the United Kingdom
Emergency medical services in the United Kingdom provide emergency care to people with acute illness or injury and are predominantly provided free at the point of use by the four National Health Services of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Emergency care including ambulance and emergency department treatment is free to everyone, regardless of immigration or visitor status; the NHS commissions most emergency medical services through the 14 NHS organisations with ambulance responsibility across the UK. As with other emergency services, the public access emergency medical services through one of the valid emergency telephone numbers. In addition to ambulance services provided by NHS organisations, there are some private and volunteer emergency medical services arrangements in place in the UK, the use of private or volunteer ambulances at public events or large private sites, as part of community provision of services such as community first responders. Air ambulance services in the UK are not part of the NHS and are funded through charitable donations.
Paramedics are seconded from a local NHS ambulance service, with the exception of Great North Air Ambulance Service who employ their own paramedics. Doctors are provided by their home hospital and spend no more than 40% of their time with an air ambulance service. Public ambulance services across the UK are required by law to respond to four types of requests for care, which are: Emergency calls Doctor's urgent admission requests High dependency and urgent inter-hospital transfers Major incidentsAmbulance trusts and services may undertake non-urgent patient transport services on a commercial arrangement with their local hospital trusts or health boards, or in some cases on directly funded government contracts, although these contracts are fulfilled by private and voluntary providers; the National Health Service Act 1946 gave county and borough councils a statutory responsibility to provide an emergency ambulance service, although they could contract a voluntary ambulance service to provide this, with many contracting the British Red Cross, St John Ambulance or another local provider.
The last St John Division, to be so contracted is reputed to have been at Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire, where the two-bay ambulance garage can still be seen at the branch headquarters. The Regional Ambulance Officers’ Committee reported in 1979 that “There was considerable local variation in the quality of the service provided in relation to vehicles and equipment. Most Services were administered by Local Authorities through their Medical Officer of Health and his Ambulance Officer, a few were under the aegis of the Fire Service, whilst others relied upon agency methods for the provision of part or all of their services.” The 142 existing ambulance services were transferred by the National Health Service Reorganisation Act 1973 from local authority to central government control in 1974, consolidated into 53 services under regional or area health authorities. This led to the formation of predominantly county based ambulance services, which merged up and changed responsibilities until 2006, when there were 31 NHS ambulance trusts in England.
The June 2005 report "Taking healthcare to the Patient", authored by Peter Bradley, Chief Executive of the London Ambulance Service, for the Department of Health led to the merging of the 31 trusts into 13 organisations in England, plus one organisation each in Wales and Northern Ireland. Following further changes as part of the NHS foundation trust pathway, this has further reduced to 10 ambulance service trusts in England, plus the Isle of Wight which has its own provision. Following the passage of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, commissioning of the ambulance services in each area passed from central government control into the hands of regional clinical commissioning groups; the commissioners in each region are responsible for contracting with a suitable organisation to provide ambulance services within their geographical territory. The primary provider for each area is held by a public NHS body, of which there are 11 in England, 1 each in the other three countries. In England there are now ten NHS ambulance trusts, as well as an ambulance service on the Isle of Wight, run directly by Isle of Wight NHS Trust, with boundaries following those of the former regional government offices.
The ten trusts are: East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust London Ambulance Service NHS Trust North East Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust North West Ambulance Service NHS Trust South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust West Midlands Ambulance Service University NHS Foundation Trust Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS TrustThe English ambulance trusts are represented by the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives, with the Scottish and Northern Irish providers all associate members. On the 14 November 2018 West Midlands Ambulance Service became the UK's first university-ambulance trust; the service was operated before reorganisation in 1974 by the St Andrews’ Ambulance Association under contract to the Secretary of State for Scotland. The Scottish Ambulance Service is a Special Health Board that provides ambulance services throughout whole of Scotland, on behalf of the Health and Social Care Directorates of the Scottish Government.
Due to the remote nature of many areas of Scotland compared to the other Home Nations, the Scottish Ambulance Service has Britain's only publi
