page_title: Ambulance
section_title: Air ambulance
hierarchical_section_title: Ambulance / Air ambulance
caption_attribution_description: English: HM72 pictured in Longsleddale
context_page_description: An ambulance is a type of vehicle made to carry sick or injured people. Normally, ambulances go to people in emergencies to take people to hospital. Examples of emergencies include heart attacks, strokes, serious bleeding, broken bones, chest pain, serious head injuries, trouble breathing, and people injured in situations like car crashes and falls.
  The first ambulances were used on battlefields, when horse-drawn carts carried badly wounded soldiers to field hospitals after the battle. Horse-drawn ambulances became commonplace in Europe and North America in the 19th century, as hospitals became common. Automobiles replaced horses in the early 1900s. Today's ambulances are vans which are converted into small mobile clinics. They can provide first aid, emergency care, various medicines and life support, and carry patients to hospital.
  Ambulances normally have emergency medical technicians and paramedics who work on them. They carry medicines and special equipment that can keep people alive. They also carry advanced tools for delivering babies in an emergency and restarting a heart.
context_section_description: Air ambulances became more common in the late 20th century.  Helicopters carry the same kind equipment as a typical ground ambulance.  In the United States, the Coast Guard runs a public air ambulance service using helicopters.  There are also privately owned air ambulance services that provide for a wider range of needs, including international transport.
  Air ambulances are especially important in countries with low population density (few people, living in a vast area) such as Canada, Russia, midwest USA, Sweden or Finland.  They can often save a life of a patient who would otherwise die because he could not be carried fast enough to hospital by other means.
caption: A UK helicopter ambulance
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