When the wheels come off

March 6th, 2014: A wheel comes off an ambulance in the early hours of the morning. No patient is on board, but the vehicle had just been used to bring a sick person to hospital in Drogheda.

February 27th, 2014: Dublin City Council and the HSE announce plans to review ambulance services in the city . The review is to be completed by the end of May .

February 22nd, 2014: Kathleen Gilgunn, who is 87 and terminally ill, wounds her head in a fall at home in Meath. The ambulance arrives 87 minutes after her husband telephones 999.

January 31st, 2014: A Mayo GP has to deliver baby Amaya Gallagher in his surgery in Mulran y. An a mbulance arrives 40 minutes after the GP phones 999 .

December 28th, 2013: It takes paramedics an hour to get to an accident in Wilkinstown, Co Meath, where Donal Blaney is trapped under a jeep. The emergency services are alerted at 6.39pm; an ambulance arrives at 7.40pm.

October 25th, 2013: Paddy Cunningham becomes unwell at a function in Navan, Co Meath. He waits 30 minutes for an ambulance, and dies in hospital.

September 19th, 2013: An ambulance transporting a lung-transplant patient from Cork to Dublin breaks down, having run out of fuel on its way to hospital.

June 27th, 2013: The HSE is fined €500,000 for safety breaches that led to Simon Sexton, a paramedic, falling out of a moving ambulance in June 2010.

June 18th, 2013: The mother of a sick child in Tralee, Co Kerry, calls an ambulance when her infant son stops breathing. It does not arrive for half an hour. The ambulance was wrongly dispatched to an address in Cork. The child dies.

May 8th, 2013: Two-year-old Vakaris Martinaitis dies at Cork University Hospital two days after falling from an upstairs window at the family's home in Midleton . An ambulance is dispatched but is mistakenly stood down. A neighbour drives the toddler to SouthDoc, from where he is sent to hospital.

December 2012: Lengthy transfer times for patients with severe spinal injuries are criticised by the director of the n ational s pinal- injuries u nit, Keith Synnott, who says the unit is sometimes notified early in the morning to expect patients with severe spinal injuries who are not delivered until late at night, with potentially catastrophic outcomes.

December 14th, 2012: A High Court judge awards damages to Fiona Ní Chonchubhair, whose baby was stillborn on May 16th, 2009 . She was sent by ambulance from Kerry General Hospital, in Tralee, on a 110km journey to Cork Regional Hospital, but the blood transfusion she needed was not available in the ambulance.

January 16th, 2012: It takes 17 minutes for an ambulance to arrive when 75-year-old Maureen Kane is knocked down 200 metres from an ambulance station. She died from her injuries.