Posts filed under 'General'
I knew there would be something that would make me return to this thing. Something big, that I’d want to vent about. Or perhaps something reflecting on a past post.
You see, when I come across something I want to blog about, I always think to myself I’ll write about that in a few months or so in an aim to retain a little anonymity (I have read the Tom Reynold’s ‘How To Blog And Not Lose Your Job‘ - several times). But of course, a few months later they have passed into the depths of my mind and any inclination I had to write about them originally has long since departed.
But swine flu would appear to be the impetus I needed to log back in to Wordpress and actually write something. Of course, the piggy flu pandemic seems to have made every other blogger appear from the woodwork and write too.
Most people in this job get annoyed with the time wasters. The people who call an ambulance when there really isn’t anything wrong with them. In all honesty, I’m really not that bothered by them. I see them as job security - my ambulance trust is recruiting several hundred people this year, and there’s unlimited amounts of overtime available. Just the other night I spoke to someone who has worked every single day for the past three weeks.
Despite all this, people who are calling about swine flu are getting to me now. At first, I admit it was quite fun to dress up in all the protective gear, but now it’s really starting to become a nuisance. I am probably seeing between 4 and 8 people a day with flu-like symptoms. Most of them don’t actually want to go to hospital, they just want to know if they’ve got it or not. I must admit that I do find this quite puzzling. What’s the big deal if you have swine flu or not? Just because it has a fancy name, hyped by the media, doesn’t make it any different to normal flu. In fact, from all the people I have seen with it, swine flu is nowhere near as bad as normal flu.
Entire families are calling with identical symptoms, and the first question out of their mouths is ‘have I got swine flu?’ Based on the fact that your six-year-old child’s school has been closed because there has been an outbreak there, said child is showing symptoms and now you are, what do you think? The HPA (in Birmingham anyway) are no longer swabbing suspected patients, so all I am going to do is take a guess based on your symptoms and the contact you’ve had - all things that you already know… because you told me them. So now I have to fill out an A3 size form for each member of your family, while taking a full set of baseline observations (blood pressure, temperature etc.) and passing the details on the ‘flu cell’. After that, all the equipment we took in has to be thoroughly cleaned, so one family of people sniffing and coughing has taken a frontline ambulance off the road for a minimum of 2 hours, as well as exposing both crew members to the virus.
At one house I went to, no sooner had I uttered the words “based on what you have told me, the likelihood is that you have swine flu“, but someone behind me grabbed their mobile phone and excitedly informed someone else that Dave has got ‘The Swine Flu’.
In all honesty, I don’t know where I am going with this blog entry. I’m not going to lecture you what to do about Swine Flu as you are all educated enough to know better. This is probably a good place to stop…
July 8th, 2009
I appear to have written a grand total of seven posts in the past twelve months. I will write more, it stops Merys Jones bugging me to post anyway!
August 16th, 2008
Okay, I’m back at last. I have just removed 2070 spam comments (as well as 8 genuine ones that slipped in there too - sorry guys!) and now I’m ready to go again (with an updated Wordpress and a spam filter in place, thank you very much WP-HashCash!).
A lot of stuff has been going on at my end, so blogging has been put on the back burner. But once again, I promise to write a lot more often (if only you got a pound for every time I’ve said that…)
Onwards and upwards.
February 7th, 2008
A good friend of mine recently asked me how people react to seeing an ambulance and an ambulance service uniform for an academic research project. An observation on the way to a job yesterday yielded such an anecdote (it’s just a shame the paper has already been written and submitted).
En-route to a man suffering from chest pain, I was driving down a leafy suburban road under the strict instruction of Mavis, our all-knowing navigation device. Approaching a set of traffic lights, the priority turned against me leaving a red light and crossing traffic in front. On went the sirens, crawl up to the junction, a change of tone and I was able to safely cross the road. A quick glance at the occupant of the car on the other side of the junction revealed a grey-haired man in his 60s, wearing a black shirt with a white ‘dog-collar’. He looked at the ambulance and made the sign of the Cross on his chest while his moving lips showed he was enunciating what was presumably a prayer for the person we were on our way to assist.
Maybe I have never really quite considered what impact the sight of an ambulance making its way through the traffic has on some people, but I found this reaction quite overwhelming. Before I joined the ambulance service, I concerned myself more with ensuring my car was in the best possible position to facilitate the easy movement of an emergency vehicle around me than really giving much consideration to what they were actually responding to. Quite often I rather cynically satisfied myself with the idea that they had just collected hot food and wanted to return to their station quickly before it got cold. I now know that this never happens (certainly not in the ambulance service - I can honestly say that I have never seen the lights and sirens mis-used), but now when I see an ambulance when I am not at work, I still rather cynically think of what rubbish the crew are responding to this time.
A pessimist is never disappointed.
October 8th, 2006
Having just come back from a week of annual leave doing volunteer work away from home, I have been thinking about people’s perceptions of the ambulance service. Nearly all of the people I have been with for the past week I have never met before and I was quite taken aback by the interest people showed in what I do. I didn’t once get the normal question “is it like Casualty/ER/[insert hospital drama programme here]?” In fact, I was surprised at the questions I did get. Some people wanted to know what people’s houses were like, others wanted to know what the worst incident I have ever been to was (a very common question - any budding psychologists out there feel free to tell me why this is!). One person who had no medical background kept giving me different scenarios and wanted to know what I would do which kept me amused while driving the minibus.
So why blog this? Well aside from not really having much else to write about, I was asked what the least worthy call I had been out to was. I have countless tales of drunks and other rubbish I can tell - most of them boring, but it made me remember one call I went out to last summer. Late evening, around 11:30 pm, I was called to an 8 year old boy with a wrist injury. I can’t remember now whether or not this got a blue light response, but it wasn’t far from station anyway.
When we got there, the patient was being held by his mother, apparently quite drowsy. Immediate thoughts were this child is either just tired or may have a head injury as well as a wrist injury. It soon became clear that it was benign former and not the more critical latter that was the case. The child told us his right (dominant) wrist was aching, with pain travelling upwards towards, but not as far as his elbow. The pain was obviously muscular from its description and location. There was nothing visible on the arm to suggest any serious traumatic injury, he had full movement and power in it. So the next step was to get some history. “When did this pain start?” I asked. “About 3 hours ago” came the reply. “What happened three hours ago?” I enquired further. “We were just sitting at home” his mother answered. So far, no clues but I continued to probe a little deeper. “Has he being doing anything out of the ordinary today? Anything different to what he would normally do at home?” I questioned “Yes, we went bowling” came the all important reply.
Now I don’t know about you, but when I have gone bowling I have usually had a stiff, aching forearm later that evening. The mother even told me that he had the same pain last time he went bowling. These are the sort of calls that leave you tearing your hair out, wondering what would possess anyone to call an emergency ambulance for this. Suffice to say the mother was advised that a hospital trip for this would not be especially appropriate and that if he was still in pain in the morning to go and see a doctor.
The sad thing is, if she had insisted she wanted to take her son to hospital, we could not have refused to take her. The Patient’s Charter introduced about ten years ago states that everyone is entitled to an ambulance when they want one, and everyone is entitled to go to hospital if they want to go. So next time you see a news article about an ambulance taking a ridiculous length of time to get to a seriously ill person, think of the crew who could have been responding to them tearing their hair out at an ‘emergency’ call like that one.
August 28th, 2006
Finally, a brilliant website is back online - www.ambulancetechnicianstudy.co.uk. The site contains some good notes on the material taught for the IHCD Emergency Medical Technician award (which is now fast becoming obsolete) and is good refresher training for people like me. Worth a read.
April 26th, 2006
You’d probably be surprised at the number of drunk elderly people the ambulance service goes out to. Yesterday was no different. For some reason, elderly people are expected to be responsible people who sit around, staring out the window and regailing stories of ‘how things used to be’ whilst sucking Werther’s Originals. Are they not allowed to have some fun?
The first job of the day came in late afternoon to a woman in her 80s, found on the floor in her home. We got there to find her lying on the living room floor, gripping on for dear life to a table and a chair. She seemed very disoriented, believing she was on a staircase outside and unable to recall the answers to the normal orientation assessment questions: what day is it, what year is it, who is the prime minister, where are you, how many pence in a pound etc. Common answers are Monday, 1965, Harold Wilson, Weston-super-Mare, 240 etc., but this lady couldn’t even attempt answers. It was then that her daughter told us she had Alzheimer’s disease, and she would not normally be able to answer these questions - however she is not her normal self. We asked if she had been drinking - half a litre of whisky and two glasses of wine came the reply from her daughter. Alzheimer’s and excess alcohol probably isn’t the best combination of circumstances.
After establishing she had no pain anywhere and carrying out basic observations, our next task was to get her into her chair. This is normally fairly easy when the person has some mobility like this one did. However, due to this combination of Alzheimer’s and intoxication, she was actively working against us to sit her up and then get her standing. It soon became clear that we were not going to get her up that way. Our only other option was the orthopaedic (scoop) stretcher, but she was quite a large woman and given the access to the house, we were not going to be able to safely lift her with just the two of us because some steep steps were involved. So we did the correct thing and called for a second ambulance to come and assist us with the lift. After about 10 minutes, six men come walking up the garden path all dressed in West Midlands Fire Service uniform. It turned out that there were no free ambulances to send to us so we got a fire engine instead! Now that’s fine by me because instead of having four bodies to lift this woman, we now had eight. Once we had loaded up, off we went to A&E and the rest was plain sailing.
April 16th, 2006
A lot of my friends from school don’t know the career pathway I chose. So when I meet someone I haven’t seen in a while, the conversation inevitably goes along the lines of “so what are you doing now?”. Trying to explain to people whose knowledge of the ambulance service is limited to watching the odd episode of Casualty what an Ambulance Technician/Emergency Medical Technician/Stretcher Monkey like me does is not all that easy. The conversation usually runs something like this:
“So what are you up to now?”
“I’m working for West Midlands Ambulance Service now.”
“Ah, so you’re a paramedic?”
“Well, I’m not actually a paramedic, but what I do is essentially the same but I cannot give as many drugs as a paramedic.”
“Right. I’m confused.”
At this stage, I am trying to explain that I do give injections, but I cannot gain IV access (putting ‘lines’ into the backs of hands or arms); I do basic airway management, but I don’t intubate; I can give some pain relief, but not morphine and there’s a few other things that paramedics do (like take clinical responsibility for everything I do…)
The next question is invariably
“Do you drive the ambulances?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you get to drive with the blue lights on?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you get to use the sirens/woo woos/nee naws/whatever they want to call it?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Ah, so you drive the ambulances then.”
“Yes, I do.” (Some of my friends can be a little slow on the uptake, bless them)
“So do you ever treat the patients?”
“Yes, I do. We generally take it in turns to drive and attend [to the patient].”
The conversation then takes one of three routes:
- Have you ever seen a dead body?
- What is the worst thing you have seen?
- What’s it like driving on blue lights?
And out of those three, the blue light question is the one most frequently asked (especially from male friends). You ask most technicians and paramedics and you will get something like “The novelty soon wears off and it’s just part of the job.”, and yes, there are people on the road who are bored of it and don’t enjoy it, but they’re generally the people who tell you ‘the ambulance service has changed’ and ‘it was better in my day, when we didn’t have portable oxygen, spinal boards, drugs, defibrillators, ECG monitors…’ These are the people who put the blue lights on and drive at 30 mph, stop at red lights and generally confuse every other driver on the road.
But the truth be known, most of the people on the road enjoy the driving. It is very mentally draining and hard work having to manouvre a Renault Master van conversion with little in the way of acceleration through rush hour traffic. The main problem is people just don’t know what to do when they see blue strobes in their mirror. Some people carry on regardless, others dive onto the nearest pavement and put their hazard lights on with no regard for any pedestrian who might be there! The favourite is the car ahead of the car in front pulls over to the left and stops but the car in between doesn’t look in his mirrors and is oblivious to the siren so overtakes the stopped car, but in the process of doing so, suddenly sees what’s behind and realises why the first car stopped, so dangerously cuts in and more often than not ends up on the pavement.
A common misconception is that the emergency services abuse the blue lights. Whilst I cannot speak for organisations other than the ambulance service, in all the time of being on the road, I have never known the lights to be used inappropriately. That’s not to say that every ambulance with its lights on is going to someone who is about to die. West Midlands Ambulance Service changed it’s driving policy in February from A and B category calls only getting a blue light response to any 999 call now getting a blue light response. I do not agree with this, but control will insist every call is treated as ‘hot response’. Ultimately it’s up to the driver to claim the exemptions if they feel it is necessary and you won’t see many people putting the lights on for someone who’s called an ambulance because their TV remote doesn’t work and they can’t change the channel. Yes, people have called for that before.
So in short, when you see blue lights behind you, signal, pull over to the left (in the UK!) and stop. Completely. Don’t continue to roll at 5 mph. Stop. I could go on about stopping in a sensible place, but that could take forever…
April 11th, 2006
Well, I have just spent quite some time making the top banner for this site, and yes it is true, I really do like curry. The problem is I am just not eating so many of them of late. That’s something to work on in March…
Ah, and if anyone’s interested, the original picture of the spices was unceremoniously stolen from here.
February 25th, 2006
Well hello, and welcome to my blog. This is not my first blog, or second, it is in fact my third. The other two are probably still out there in cyberspace decaying by the minute. Suffice to say I didn’t get into the other two really. Maybe this will be different. We’ll see.
But anyway, That is all for now.
February 24th, 2006