It looks like the first case of 'granny dumping' of the season. Every year, around this time, families will do their best to get their elderly relatives admitted to hospital. I've personally see quite a few cases of it. It isn't helped that, because no-one wants to get sued for sending someone home who isn't suitable to be discharged, people are sometimes admitted for 'social reasons'. This ties up hospital beds in acute wards because the patient has nowhere else to go.

It is a sad state of affairs - and in this case I would want to see the family prosecuted, if only because I think Oldchurch is an awful hospital...

I'm back at work, and it's 4am on a grotty Thursday morning. Our Control contacted us and told us that we had a job to go to, while she was telling us this the dispatcher kept apologising, so I knew it was going to be a rubbish job. We got a Category 'A' call to a man who is "Not alert, severe respiratory distress, unable to talk properly, intoxicated". So we race around to the bus garage that the call came from, to find three, very well looking people standing around talking.
Apparently our patient (who is as fit as a fiddle, and not even that drunk) managed to fall asleep at the bus station while waiting for his nightbus, and another man became concerned and called for an ambulance. Luckily for the caller, I was driving - and so I didn't ask him why the hell he told our control that the patient had severe difficulty in breathing, or why he thought that calling an ambulance was a good idea. The patient didn't want to go to hospital, and wondered if we could give him a lift home (his home is about six miles away) and when we said we couldn't take him home, the patient decided to wait for his bus , much to the surprise of the caller.

Once more, a bystander/good samaritan is confused and frightened by someone who is asleep - and that they believe that this warrants an ambulance, and then when we turn up they try to tell us that the person 'needs to be in hospital'. I would be mortified if anyone called an ambulance for me whenever I fell asleep on the train/bus/tube.

Can I also ask that if you phone an ambulance because you are having a baby - can you at least wait the 11 minutes it takes us to traipse across our area to reach you, before making your own way to hospital. This is especially true if it is five o'clock in the morning. Either wait for us, or make you own way to hospital without waking my crewmate up from his sleep on the sofa.