The London Ambulance Service NHS Trust (LAS) is an NHS trust responsible for operating ambulances and answering and responding to urgent and emergency medical situations within the London region of England. The service responds to 999 phone calls across the region, and 111 phone calls from certain parts, providing triage and advice to enable an appropriate level of response. It is one of the busiest ambulance services in the world, and the busiest in the United Kingdom, providing care to more than 8.6million people, who live and work in London. The service is currently under the leadership of chief executive Daniel Elkeles and chair Andrew Trotter OBE QPM. The service employs around 5,300 staff. It is one of ten ambulance services trusts in England providing emergency medical services, and is part of the National Health Service, receiving direct government funding for its role. The LAS responded to over 2.1million 999 calls for assistance, and over 1.2million incidents in the year ended March 2020. Incidents rose by 20,000 in 2015/16, putting more pressure on the service. All 999 calls from the public are answered at one of the two Emergency Operations Centres (EOC) in Waterloo or Newham who then dispatch and allocate the appropriate resources. To assist, the service's command and control system is linked electronically with the equivalent system for London's Metropolitan Police. This means that police updates regarding specific jobs will be updated directly on the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) log, to be viewed by the EOC, and the resources allocated to the job. History In 1818, a parliamentary select committee had recommended that provision be made for carrying infectious patients in London "which would prevent the use of coaches or sedan chairs" but nothing was done. In 1866, a Hospital Carriage Fund provided six carriages to hospitals in the metropolitan area, for the use of patients with smallpox or other infectious diseases, provided that they pay for the hire of the horses. The first permanent ambulance service in London was established by the Metropolitan Asylums Board (MAB) in 1879, when a new Poor Law Act empowered them "to provide and maintain carriages suitable for the conveyance of persons suffering from any infectious disorder". The first became operational at The South Eastern Fever Hospital, Deptford, in October 1883. In all, six hospitals operated horse-drawn "land ambulances", putting almost the whole of London within of one of them. Each ambulance station