The Long Drive In

July 18th, 2007

When a call comes in for a cardiac arrest, control do their best to send two ambulances, or at least one ambulance and a responder if we’re a bit stretched. Extra pairs of hands are very useful!

Everyone pitches in with the resuscitation effort and when it comes to moving the patient to hospital, we load them on to the most appropriate ambulance. Let me explain. All ambulances are, in theory, the same. But it depends on a number of factors as to which one we use. It one is a paramedic crew, and the other isn’t, we’ll probably use the paramedic’s ambulance because he/she will know where everything is, and is the person who’ll be helping the patient the most. Otherwise, it’ll normally be whoever got there first. In the past, I have known these ‘rules’ have been broken for various reasons. Once, the side door broke off and stuck open. Another time, someone (me!) thought they had lost the keys to the ambulance so the second one took the patient. Of course, when I went back to grab equipment, the keys were beneath where I had been kneeling to do CPR!

So once on the back, more hands are still needed, so one person drives, and two people will go in the back with the patient, leaving one person to drive the other, now empty, ambulance to hospital to reunite with the other crew member. This is also a good means of transporting relatives to hospital. They don’t see what’s being done to their loved one, they don’t get caught up in the blue light driving to A&E and hence they arrive after their loved one has been safely transferred to the hospital bed and worked on by the swarm of doctors and nurses waiting.

Quite a few times recently, for no particular reason, I have ended up being the driver of said empty ambulance. The relative will sit in the front passenger seat and is more often than not the husband/wife/partner of the patient. This makes for a difficult conversation on the way in. I always feel obliged to make conversation with these people, as I can only begin to imagine what is going through their mind’s. Often, people want to talk about what they did before we arrived and if it was the right thing. Others will talk about what a surprise this has been to them. Others still will want to talk about something completely different, seemly unaware of what is going on (I realise this is some people’s coping mechanism).

Subjects I have talked about before include the weather, where they have lived, what work they have done and holidays. The latter I once found to be a mistake, so never mention this one now since a woman burst out into tears when telling me she was supposed to be going away the very next week with her husband.

The other difficult situation is the prognosis of the situation. It is hard not to give false hope to the relatives because I know the chance of survival is slim, less than 1%, yet I do not want to tell them their loved one is dead because 1.) the front of an ambulance is not the place to do it, and 2.) as I said before, there is that less than 1% chance that I might be wrong.

Whilst it’s not the nicest of things I have to do at work, I like to think that these conversations make the process just that little bit easier for the relatives. I once had a relative thank me for keeping their mind off what was going on, so now I make an extra special effort.

Entry Filed under: Work