Blood, Sweat & Tea, page 59 by Tom Reynolds
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ce and the 17-seaters that we are given are that ambulances are automatic, while the 17-seaters are manual (I believe the American term is 'stick'), and that 17-seaters just don't 'feel' like an ambulance.
The training course consists of 2days of fun, and the rest is chasing each other around the countryside at high speed.
The two days of fun include driving around a racing track, spinning around a skid-pan and swerving around traffic cones at high speed - both forward and in reverse.
Then, for the next 2weeks, you learn some theory in the classroom such as the 'limit point' and the forces that act on a vehicle (and why sometimes speeding up when you are losing control is a good thing). The rest of the time is spent driving at high speed around the countryside, making sure that you have the correct gear speed and suchlike for high-speed cornering.
There are a few things that make this training course less than effective: the first is that as the London Ambulance Service, it is extremely rare that you find yourself driving in the countryside, it is also rare that you drive at any speed above 40m.p.h. and, as mentioned earlier, ambulances are automatic vehicles and as such don't have gears.
I drove an actual, real ambulance a grand total of once during training. I sat in the drivers seat, pointed to the lever in the middle of the floor and said, 'what's that, and where is the clutch pedal?'
Luckily for me learning to drive an automatic is pretty easy.
At no point during the driving course did we drive on 'blue lights and sirens' - something that may have caused my first RTA.
(Insert wobbly flashback special effect here...)
The first day out on the road out of training school went well. I was attending (A&E nurse for some years) and my crewmate was driving (his previous job? 'Man and Van' - driving a removal van around London doing odd jobs). So the driving went well, as did the attending (dealing with sick people). The next day our roles were swappe