A voluntary response

I find my response to this story strangely ambivalent.

A TEAM of volunteers have been giving their time to save lives in Swindon for the last two years….
Whenever the Great Western Ambulance Service receive a category A emergency call, first responders in the neighbourhood are sent out at the same time.

There are twelve of these volunteers in Swindon and according to the article they have saved the lives of three people during the last two years.

On the one hand it is good that extra lives are being saved. On the other, although I wouldn’t want the operation to be subsumed into a state-run bureaucracy, with all the money now being poured into the NHS it is strange that small but significant activities like this depend on unpaid volunteers.