East of England Ambulance Service

The East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust (EEAST) is an NHS trust responsible for providing National Health Service (NHS) ambulance services in the counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, in the East of England region. These consist of approximately 6.2 million people across an area of 7,500 square miles (19,000 km²).

It is one of ten ambulance services trusts providing England with emergency medical services, and is part of the NHS, receiving direct government funding for its role.

As well as providing an emergency ambulance service, the trust also provides non emergency patient transport services, commercial services and special operations such as emergency planning, and hazardous materials incident response. The service also support a number of emergency charities, such as air ambulances, who provide doctors for serious incidents.

The trust controls the mobilisation of critical care charities throughout its area. These include Magpas (HEMS), Essex & Herts Air Ambulance (HEMS), East Anglian Air Ambulance (HEMS), BASICS Essex Accident Rescue Service (BEARS), Suffolk Accident Rescue Service (SARS), Norfolk Accident Rescue Service (NARS), BASICS Hertfordshire, and the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Emergency Critical Care Service (BHECCS). The service can also, if required, mobilise London's Air Ambulance and even the Kent, Surrey and Sussex Air Ambulance if there is a major incident requiring more than one critical care team, and where other teams in the region are operating at maximum capacity. The trauma teams are dispatched by a critical care paramedic and dispatcher at the critical care desk, housed in the Tactical Operations Centre based at Chelmsford AOC, who filter through every call the ambulance service receives, interrogates it and makes a clinical decision on whether to dispatch a critical care resource.