environments. The team provides capability in arenas such as water rescue, safe working at height, search and rescue including the use of breathing apparatus, and confined space working. The SORT teams also provide a full-time emergency decontamination and inner-cordon capability. The Inverness team has been disbanded and their equipment removed as of 2022. ScotSTAR With the remote towns and villages in Scotland often being hours away from advanced medical treatment, Scottish Specialist Transport and Retrieval (ScotSTAR) was setup incorporating paediatric and neo-natal retrieval and transfer teams and EMRS. The ScotSTAR service was set up on 1 April 2014 and transported 2,654 patients 20142015. The service uses multiple vehicles, either owned by the ambulance service or other organisations: specialist ambulances and cars, five air ambulances and HM Coastguard helicopters. The service is based in Glasgow. EMRS (The Emergency Medical Retrieval Service) was created in 2004 by ten emergency medical consultants from Glasgow and Paisley. Initially, the service provided aeromedical cover to six isolated hospitals within Argyll and Bute. The ten consultants only had £40,000 worth of funding for medical equipment. In its first year the service transported 40 patients. In years to follow, the clinical crew began to gather evidence for the life-saving impact and cost effectiveness of the service. Following a successful 18-month trial period in the West of Scotland funded by the Scottish Government, in 2010 the service was opened up to the whole of the country, after securing permanent funding. The service is currently staffed by 47 part-time retrieval consultants, 14 retrieval practitioners, and 14 registrars, carrying out around 1000 missions every year. Training academy The service has its own dedicated training academy within the campus of Glasgow Caledonian University, which opened in June 2011. The facility has purpose built classrooms, lecture theatres, syndicate rooms and a clinical simulation area that recreates a 16-bed hospital ward and Accident & Emergency department allowing realistic interaction with other trainee healthcare professionals. From 1996 until April 2011, the service used its own dedicated training college located at Barony Castle in Eddleston near Peebles. Set in of formal gardens and woodlands, Barony was a residential training and conference centre with 78 bedrooms that allowed the service to carry out all its training in house. Between 1978 and 1996 it used the former Redlands women's and children's hospital in Glasgow's west end and prior to that the training school was based at Gartloch