AFTER having read your front page article of December 30, 'We're Ready For Anything,' I was quite concerned. I was under the impression that there are three emergency services, police, fire and ambulance, but your report only mentions police and fire. Are we the general public lead to believe that there were no contingency plans and maybe no ambulance service for the Millennium eve?

I don't think so!

The already very hard pressed and greatly underfunded ambulance service was pushed to its very limits over the New Year period, with men being expected to work a full 12 hour shift on the road, with no breaks at all.

This can, and very often does happen on normal working days and nights, but it is expected on a typical New Year's Eve that workload is greatly increased - and even more so for the Millennium.

These men are very often in circumstances putting their own lives at risk, in rescue situations, dealing with crazed drug addicts and drunken and abusive patients, and then they are expected to administer precisely measured life saving drugs to heart patients, asthmatics or patients involved in road traffic accidents and many other kinds of incidents all of which can and do occur in the space of a single 'normal' shift.

The trauma these men and women have to experience as part of their lives every day, not just now and again, and the responsibility they have to take in using their hard earned skills of administering drugs is not reflected in their salaries.

These are the men and women you overlooked.

Even if this service was contacted for its plans and no comments were made, it should have been reported as such. I found your report very unfair and giving a false impression to the general public.

From the wife of an ambulance paramedic (both ground and air crew) because we are the ones at home, and try our best to be understanding and supportive for our husbands and partners and worry silently, and watch when our husbands and partners' valiant efforts are unrecognised, unappreciated and unreported.

Name and

address supplied

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.