Sigh! indeed Sam; So on behalf of the faceless bureaucratic twits... I don't have a list of failures (and if I did I doubt Tom would be on it) I guess my main point about nursing in the manner described by Tom is that nurses have a full compliment of information available to them when they do it. A nurse can give individual care to a patient and their family because they know what's going on with all the rest of the patients in their ward/unit. They are fully aware that the patient two beds over is not having a cardiac arrest and of course were that to happen they would stop what they were doing and deal with the medical emergency. Ambulance staff do not have that information. They don't know if there's a cardiac arrest down the road, they don't know if a kid's just been knocked over and more importantly they don't know where the nearest available ambulance to any of those calls would be coming from. Does any of that mean that this sort of personal care is wrong? Well no, but it's worth remembering that all those faceless morons like myself, who don't care about patients, only targets, actually work for you and our job is simply to recognise that we need to get the best possible care to EVERY patient, not just the one in front of you at that moment in time. DSO