Ambulance service is one of those things that is unusual in the UK, I think, being a specific separate service. When I moved to Tokyo and found that the ambulances were run by the Fire Brigade, it made me realise how UK-centric my expectations of certain ways of organising things are. I knew the US did things very differently (partly due to having watched "Mother, Jugs and Speed" but then I knew the US health system was just completely different to everywhere else anyway. I though other countries were more like the UK than the US, but later realised that the Ambulance Service is a single service because of the NHS and that countries without such a monolithic health care system have to do things differently.
Ambulances here go very slowly, too. Maybe that's just Tokyo, but they always seem incredibly cautious on the road compared with how they move in the UK (when under blues-n-twos anyway).