Brian If you read the LAS news of about two months ago, the one where the FRU was parked on it's roof on page three, top right hand corner it tells us what our leaders have got planned for us leading up to the Olympics. Basically they want to cock it up for all of us. they are planning more paramedics and EMT 4's but are binning all EMT 2 & 3's so that is how a large chunk of money should be saved, but they have bought in the brand new A&E support , as far as I am aware A&E support courses will continue to run in to next year, plus they are half the length of the tech course so are cheaper to run, and on top of that are only in band c of the agenda for change the only problem is no one seems to know how to progress internally through the ranks from A&E support up to paramedic. There are rumours of a bridging course up to EMT in which case why not just start us off as EMT 2's in the first place or the other option is through paramedic degree courses however Greenwich had something like 800 applicants for 17 positions on the course. there are not many universities in Britain which run the course, so this idea may lead to a drop in paramedics, also some of these students are buggering off to Oz as soon as they have passed, for a new life in the sun. On top of that management are binning some trucks on the road in favour of the cars (orcon targets) so instead of our punters dying because no bystander started doing CPR, they are dying on the street after a FRU driver has been bagging them for 40 minutes and managed to get a copper to do the CPR, where they are too knackered to continue to do it themselves. all that because there are no trucks available to take them to hospital.