23 Jul 2018
Working with the Media
The Scottish Ambulance Service’s communications team engages with the media to help inform patients, the public and stakeholders about our work across Scotland.
This includes our life-saving responses to critically ill and injured patients, our scheduled care services, key health issues such as out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, stroke and major trauma and our 2020 strategy Taking Care to the Patient.
We can help you by:
- Providing comment on our responses to public incidents and Scottish Ambulance Service related matters
- Arranging interviews with key personnel where appropriate
- Submitting and arranging features on our work
Contacting our team
The following contact information is for media use only.
Please also note that the telephone number previously provided for the media to contact our ambulance control centres is no longer in use.
Office hours
Our communications office is staffed between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. You can contact us via:
- 07811 987 697
- sas.press@nhs.scot
Outside office hours
Outside of office hours, the team is only able to respond to media enquires relating to:
- Service-declared major incidents
- corporate affairs which require statements
For all other media enquiries outside of office hours, please leave a voicemail or send an email to enable the team to respond to enquiries if required on the next working day.
Incident information we can provide
During office hours, the team will be able to supply information about public incidents if you can provide the following:
- nature of incident (e.g. road traffic collision)
- incident date
- incident time (approximate if not confirmed)
- incident location (e.g. road/street name)
In order to comply with patient confidentiality, the team is unable to provide the following information:
- patient names
- details of patient injuries
- condition checks for patients admitted to hospital
- any detail relating to patients treated at a private address for a medical condition
The team is not able to respond to speculative enquiries, for example, if you think an ambulance may have attended an incident.
Our communications team handles work with the media across Scotland and the process outlined above is to help manage the high volume of enquiries we receive.
Reporting on fatalities
Please note that fatalities can only be confirmed by Police Scotland.
- The Scottish Ambulance Service employs over 5000 highly skilled staff.
- We provide an emergency ambulance service to a population of over 5 million people, serving all mainland and island communities.
- Our Patient Transport Service also takes around 1 million patients to and from hospital.
- Each year, we respond to over 1.5 million calls for assistance.
- Over 600,000 of these are emergency and unscheduled incidents.
- We transfer around 90,000 patients between hospitals.
- Our air ambulance service undertakes around 3,500 missions.
- Our ScotSTAR service transfers 2,500 of Scotland's most seriously ill patients each year.
- We are assisted by over 1,200 volunteers, such as our community first responders.
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