Certain volunteers in both the British Red Cross and St John Ambulance are trained and authorised to drive their organisation's vehicles on blues & twos.
In practice, this happens quite rarely in most parts of the country. There are a variety of boring technical reasons which have nothing to do with driving and everything to do with emergency medicine that limit the amount of transporting of patients on bluelights done by volunteer crews.
However, in some parts of the country, SJA and BRC regularly backup the over stretched local ambulance services and, in these cases, driving under emergency conditions is more frequent.
I did some (volunteer) coaching last year for SJA in Sussex. They were training all their drivers to get through a RoADAR test. That was then to be followed by some specific response driving training in-vehicle with a local examiner who is a police advanced driver.
I insisted that all the coaching I did should be done in the ambulance and, although I naturally coached within speed limits and all other legal constraints, I did modify my normal approach.
I was stricter, especially about things like cockpit drills. I taught bolder positioning, and worked hard with my drivers to get them to spot options and opportunities that would be open to them (or not, just as importantly) with blue lights.
Above all, I tried to show them that the key to a quick journey time is very often going slowly enough to give vehicles around you time to react, allowing smooth unhindered passage.
It was fun
They all got RoADAR Gold.
James
Only two things matter: attitude & entry speeds.
