As ambulance staff warn about patient deaths and prepare to strike, one paramedic reveals what their job is really like 🚨 Big Read by robhastings
In all, we had six calls today. The next was a four-year-old girl, supposedly with a fever and breathing fast, but it turned out she just had a cough. We referred her back to her GP. You might wonder why the 999 call handler assigned an ambulance, but it’s hard to assess a patient over the phone and we can’t take risks.
Our last job was at a secure mental health unit, where convicted offenders can be sent by courts or prisons if they have disorders that need treatment. Every room needs a key, even the lift, and all the patients have trackers. We had a 15-minute response and drove in through an air lock system, where the gate behind you has to shut before the next one opens.
I’m not feeling too exhausted. Tonight I’ll drive home, cook some dinner with my partner, watch some TV and aim to be in bed by 10:30pm.A&E units in British hospitals are becoming overloaded An 88-year-old woman had called 999 at 4am after a fall. We got to her at midday. An ambulance should have been with her in 18 minutes; it took eight hours.
It must have been very sore but she was quite a trooper – one of those patients always saying, ‘Thank you very much, it’s not a bother, I don’t mind.’ We gave her pain relief but that led to painful vomiting. The patient was on a supervised outing to buy a canned drink from a corner shop, but he didn’t have enough money and got in an argument with the nurse. He said: I’m not going back to the ward, if you follow me I’ll throw you off a bridge. She trailed him about a mile and a half to a roundabout where we met them. He was just in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, no shoes on.
Eventually he calmed down. When the police turned up, their presence convinced him to get into the ambulance. You feel like a fraud when officers turn up and don’t have to do anything. A gentleman in his 60s was convinced he was having a heart attack for no other reason than ‘a feeling’. There were some mental health problems involved but he was adamant he wanted to go to hospital, so we took him for a check-up.
We only finished 15 minutes late. No break again today, but I had some leftover spaghetti and meatballs from last night that I heated up in a hospital staff room while waiting on a handover. Our second job was a severely disabled 69-year-old male. He had MS and a few years ago he’d been resuscitated after a cardiac arrest. We arrived an hour after their call, getting there at 10pm. He had abdominal pain after using the toilet; we thought maybe he’d caused himself a hernia.
While we were waiting to handover in the ambulance bay, a car screamed in and a woman jumped out. Her husband was in the back. She’d called an ambulance but nothing turned up. She asked for help. He was having significant respiratory failure, so we rushed him in – and then he had a cardiac arrest in the A&E. We jumped into the resuscitation room to help the staff. Luckily we got him back – we got his heart started again.
When we got to her – four hours after she called – it turned out she had sepsis. We took her to hospital but got stuck there for eight and a half hours, with 11 ambulances in front of us. We waited in the ambulance. Her husband was there as well. They were both teachers, so we had a chat about strikes and the state of everything at the moment.
We were freed for our next call. It was a category one: a 26-year-old woman in labour. Thankfully a car reserved for the most urgent of cases had responded before we’d even got there.
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