1281 50 HR

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:

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.