RE: the above. Am I alone in thinking that - now that they have settled in, and within the overall healthcare system - NHS24 is doing not too bad a job? Hereabouts, they seem to be managing quite well, and we can see that by far the majority of their calls are being handled by the out-of-hours GP service - either as walk-ins, by despatching out-of-hours transport, or by getting a doctor to attend. Certainly, we do get sent to calls which don't merit an emergency response; on the other hand we get sent to very few which don't merit an ambulance - particularly if you put yourself in the place of the NHS24 practitioner, and imagine what he/she envisaged - as opposed to what you can actually see when you arrive. A cautionary, true, tale of 2330hrs in the days before NHS24. (It illustrates my point, even though what we found was worse than imagined, not better.) The caller said "My husband has fallen off the settee and I can't get him off the floor." What do you visualise? An elderly gent lying on the carpet, and his frail wife struggling to help him up? Of course you do; we've all been there lots of times. What did we find as we bounced confidently through the front door? A 45 y.o. male in cardiac arrest with his wife and daughter weeping over him. Thank God the call had come as a 999. We were too late to help, but at least we had been swift, so the response looked right. I have heard plenty of "you couldn't make it up" tales about NHS24, and I've cursed them myself more than once, but the system always seems to fail safe - for which I am profoundly grateful. I have yet to hear personally of a case where NHS24 has failed to send an ambulance to somebody who needed it.