Over on Mental Kipple I thought up some ideas for iPhone applications that I'd like to see.

The one most relevant to people who read this ambulance blog is #10

10) A copy of the BNF for offline reading, and not for £100+ please.

And what should I find on release but Epocrates Rx, a free application that does much the same as the BNF (British National Formulary, a list of all the drugs in circulation) but will also help me out when I come across pills in unmarked boxes and makes it easy to look up potential drug interactions.

Trust me when I say that it is infuriating to ask a patient what medications they take and they don't know and instead hand me a plastic box with half a dozen different pills in it.

It can be especially dangerous when we want to give them drugs of our own but have to be careful about it interacting with the patient's own medicine.

Really rather quite handy and quick to look at when I don't have my BNF to hand. The only problem is that it is American software and they have some different drug names that us Brits, but it is good for some things and is definitely worth what I paid for it.

I still want #2 though,

2) An Augmented Reality Game, perhaps crossed with social software overtones - consider if you will a game that is location based to where you *really* are. Using the location services in the phone (either original iPhone, or the AGPS of the 3G iPhone)

Anyone writing one want a story consultant? Or have we enough coders here who could group together to write such a thing under my benign dictatorship...?

A hospital has admitted clamping ambulances for parking infringements and charging £50 for their release.
Security staff at King's College Hospital, south London, are clamping the non-emergency ambulances for spending too long in drop-off bays.

These ambulances are privately run ambulances who took up the contracts for patient transport. This is something that the LAS used to do in London, but then with the sneaking privatisation of the NHS the private companies started to do things cheaper and so the LAS lost a lot of these contracts.

They have, as far as I know, no exemptions to where they can park (unlike us proper emergency ambulances).

I'm not quite sure how "They clamp ambulances parked for more than an hour "to allow other vehicles into the area," works though, surely if they are clamped then they are still blocking the area?

I don't know, I'm an ambulance driver, not an ambulance parker. And if you've ever seen me park, that much is pretty obvious.

Kal has wetted my eyes. Bloody swine, he knows I'm soft for the old ones.