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67
of this kind of work and in the case of some hospitals with large and busy outpatient
departments ambulances are sent each morning to the hospital and remain
for the day at the disposal of a Transport Officer who is a member of the hospital
staff. Such a system requires careful planning and a high degree of co-operation
between the hospital authorities and the ambulance service but it has already been
put into operation at some 30 hospitals with mutually satisfactory results and
is being extended as and when the demand requires and resources permit.
The daily number of calls dealt with under these decentralised arrangements is
upwards of 600.
In addition to being in direct telephonic communication with the Control Room,
each general ambulance station has two telephone lines and each accident station
one line through the local exchange for administrative use and as a stand-by in case
of breakdown in the direct line.
The Control Room itself has, in all, 22 direct lines and 15 exchange lines which
are routed through six different telephone exchanges as a safeguard against failure
of the communications system.
The crews of accident ambulances report by telephone to the Control Room
upon arrival at hospital and an electrically operated indicator board in the Control
Room shows at a glance whether any particular accident ambulance is in its
station, on the way to a call or returning to its station. The Control Room officer
concerned is thus able to follow, from minute to minute, the movements of the
entire fleet of accident ambulances and so to ensure that emergency calls are
answered with the minimum of delay.
Similarly, the crews of "general" ambulances, upon arrival at hospitals, etc.,
report to the control room of their respective stations in order that they may, if
necessarv. be sent on to other calls without delay.
System of
communications
The report for 1949, which follows this short historical sketch, gives on pages
73 and 74 some recent statistics of the work performed by the London Ambulance
Service, but it may be of interest to give here some of these figures and to add, for
comparison, others relating to earlier years:—
Statistics

(*Figures include work done under agency arrangements by the Home
Service Ambulance Department and the Hospital Car Service.)
An interesting point, which shows how accustomed Londoners have become to
the use of the accident ambulance service, is the fact that whereas in the year
1920 only 2,455 of the 19,149 emergency calls received were made by members of
the public, the number of calls made in this way in 1949 was 46,940 out of a total
of 75.901.
The foregoing figures give some indication of the greatly increased demand for
ambulance transport which has taken place since the introduction of the National
Health Service. New measures are constantly being devised to cope with it and,
Increase in
demand for
ambulance
service