Rescue service sanity.

At long last sanity prevails in the area of this state's rescue services. We have the unusual situation that all three services - police, the fire brigade and the ambulance people all maintain separate rescue divisions. This means each have a pool of trained rescue personnel with no other duties and a fleet of vehicles dedicated to rescue work. The cost of this - and the rescue equipment which must be constantly ungraded - is enormous.
There have been many attempts to rationalize these three divisions into a single entity - but all such attempts have foundered because of a vicious turf war. Nobody wants to give up the glamour role of rescue - and so we often have more than one rescue team at an accident and a heated argument as to who will rescue the injured.
At least a partial resolution has been arrived at. The fire brigade will now assume prime responsibility for providing rescue services during the period 5 PM to 7 AM daily. This will save money because during these hours ambulance rescue is on a " call out " basis - while the fire brigade's rescue units are on a 24/7 readiness basis.
It is not a perfect answer. The missing link is " police involvement ". In many cases - specially road trauma - the police are first on the scene and tend to call their own rescue unit. There is no delegated authority nominated to take charge and as a result this usually depends on the seniority of the leader present from each service.
Ideally, the best answer would be to amalgamate the rescue services of police, fire and ambulance into a single, dedicated rescue unit. This should become an autonomous authority with a single purpose - rescue. Unfortunately that is unlikely to happen. Rescue has become political and too many egos would be bruised for such an act of sanity to prevail. A little progress has been made - but there is still a long way to go !