The Scottish Health Secretary, Nicola Sturgeon MSP, has been ordered by MSPs to make a statement to parliament on the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS).

Ambulance Nut has blogged recently on an Overtime ban within SAS. However, MSPs are now raising concerns about staff shortages and the problems this is causing (such as over-working and poor-cleaning of ambulances)

The health spokeswoman from the Labour party Margaret Curran MSP also highlighted the issue of switching from ambulances with two crew members to rapid-response vehicles staffed by one person.

She said: “There are serious questions being asked about what the changes to the ambulance service are, why they have been introduced and the actual impact they are having.”

Ms Sturgeon has claimed that the move from double crewed ambulances to single-crewed rapid response vehicles (a decision she and her cabinet colleagues took last November) has delivered a much improved service. She claims that this decision was taken in order to improve the response times of SAS “which are of the utmost importance to patients” and then passed the buck onto SAS by saying “If there is concern about these developments the service must increase its efforts in this regard and I will ensure that it does so.”

It will be interesting to see what Ambulance Nut will say about this (assuming she decides to blog on it) being a Probationary Ambulance Technician with SAS.

• Politics