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One of my friends witnessed a jogger die following a heart attack on the parkland walk. He said the police had been able to respond quickly as they knew the area but the ambulance took a while longer, seemed to trouble him that being one of the handful of people who helped as best they could he couldn't give more of a location than "on the parkland walk between that bit and the bridge bit". When we walked on it a while after he then knew all the road names(he was half giving me directions too so I could cycle off after we walked a bit) but still could tell it really got to him.
I think overall the satnav use is going to help, faster routes and such for the majority of calls must improve lots of peoples situations. Like all systems it's going to have gaps and faults, having ambulance drivers and crews who don't need local knowledge has that gap of anywhere off the system or hard to describe/input into the system being hard to find and letting the system get outdated like that makes them gaps bigger.
Clockwise-
There's never going to be any substitute for drivers knowing their patch. It's no good knowing where a patient is if you don't know how to get there. Continual familiarisation with new developments and ongoing work should be a core part of any driver's working day.
However, we aren't making the best use of the technology at our disposal. With so many people carrying around mobile phones, the fallability is depending on a person to give descriptions of where they are. It seems like it would be a simple step to have an app that, at the push of a button, takes a triangulation from phone masts and records a location then enables GPS and refines that location. With small, high priority data packets it could communicate with a system used by ambulance control effectively taking the guesswork out of location. Annoyingly, I know that the all the code pretty much already exists to do this but I'm not a programmer and have no idea how you go about putting it all together.
The_Seldom_Killer
So, this happened last year:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/02/cyclist-died-after-three-ambulances-could-not-find-olympic-velodrome