I am very pleased to welcome you to this 15th Annual General Meeting. I hope you enjoy the meeting and the evening.  Although we like to keep these meetings friendly and relaxed there is however, formal business that we must attend to.

March 15th in the Roman calendar is called the ides of March. Julius Caesar was assassinated on this day in 44 B.C. on his way to the Theatre of Pompey, after he had been warned that harm would come to him. Hence the Shakespearean warning: Beware the Ides of March.

You may have heard that the London Assembly’s Health and Public Services Committee have recently launched a review of the London Ambulance Service.

If the London Ambulance Service had been around 362 years ago yesterday (30th January 1649) we would have had crews doing Active Area Cover near the Banqueting House in Whitehall.

The first few words in the Manifesto of the Communist Party written by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels and first published in February 1848 are as follows: A spectre is haunting Europe..

The Union’s National Ambulance Sector and Health Service Group Executive voted on Monday (10th January 2011) to overwhelmingly reject the NHS Employers proposals regarding an Incremental Pay Spine freeze v Redundancies.

The word ‘no’ is a tiny word. It can be used as a refusal or a denial. It can be used in a negative way, or in a positive way. It is one of those words that if you type it in lowercase - ‘no’ - it is almost silent, but if…

In the Chinese community 2011 is the year of the Rabbit. In Britain 2011 is the year of the Cull!

When we agreed the current Rest Break Agreement in 2006, it was the first time, ever, in any Ambulance Service, that operational staff were guaranteed an uninterruptible rest break,  once it was allocated. So why is it, at the time of writing, that only 35% of staff  are actually allocated…

I couldn’t help thinking about Mary Poppins when I saw the headlines regarding the Royal Wedding this week, particularly the song “A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down”!