Hey, just because I’m leaving the FRU doesn’t mean that there is a lack of people willing to take my place.  All they have to do is listen to our management as they insist we spend more time sitting in the car (which is bad for my back) and that we faster to jobs (which is bad for my safety), and maybe spend time on standby on night shifts (which unions successfully stopped double crewed ambulances from doing, because it’s just not safe).

At the end of the day, sick people need to be in hospital, not in their own home, or on the side of the road with me standing over them watching as they get sicker and sicker.  Sure, I can give some lifesaving treatment, but this is only for a few specific illnesses.

What we need on the road are not more FRUs, which exist mainly to get our ORCON times up, what we need is less people calling ambulances more ambulances on the road.  We need more ambulances than we have at the moment, as total numbers of ambulances have hardly increased in the past ten years, while our workload has soared.

This really needs to be a subject of a long post all of it’s own.

As an example – consider Christmas Eve night.  After 1am, there were no ambulances from the busiest complex in London.  Other complexes had to cover Newham, Poplar and West Ham.

There was one FRU.

At the end of the day I believe that I will be providing better help, to more people, working on an ambulance rather than a FRU.

I think I’m going to be leaving my job soon.

I went to a six month old baby, possible meningitis.  The baby had the right sort of rash (although it was only on the back of the knee, and nowhere else.  I checked).  It had a temperature, but was one of the happiest, most alert children I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.  It just didn’t seem as if it had meningitis, and trust me, I’ve seen a fair bit of children and adults with meningitis to have a pretty good idea.

Then, like my previous post, I was left waiting for an ambulance.

I think it was around 45 minutes.

There was no way I was going to be able to transport the patient in my car.  It’s just not equipped to carry such a small child.

So the family ended up phoning a friend to take them to the hospital.  The ambulance turned up just as they were getting into their friend’s car.

All I had going through my head was “No Ambulance For Baby Dying Of Killer Bug!”.

Later that night I went to a woman who was having an extremely painful miscarriage.  There is nothing I can do for that, the patient needs to be in hospital.  Thankfully the ambulance wasn’t too far behind me, but if I had been waiting on scene, then it would have been a very awkward and distressing wait (again, because of the pain, it would have been impossible to transport her in my car).

More and more I’m looking at my watch as an ambulance fails to arrive.  It’s only a matter of time before I have someone die in front of me while waiting for an ambulance.

So, I’m seriously considering leaving the FRU/RRU and going back to work on an ambulance.  That way I can pick up sick people, and take them to where they need to be.  A hospital.

So after the holiday season, I think I’ll be sending a memo up to the office asking to return to my ambulance role.

The reason why there is a shortage of ambulances?  Partly the season and the increased number of calls, partly because while the population of our area has increased the number of ambulances haven’t, and partly because of a lack of manning.  Oh and that we have to go to crap jobs.