DISCLAIMER: I am not an economist, and while I talk about union matters I’m not a member of any union.  Everything that I post here is true to the best of my knowledge at this moment.

When the unions asked the ambulance crews if we wanted to sign up to AfC “Agenda for Change”, we didn’t know the terms and conditions, nor what we would be paid.  The unions (at least Unison) suggested that we sign up to the new deal sight unseen.

The official deadline for the implementation of AfC was October 2004 – but it has taken so long for our pay to be worked out, we have only just started receiving it.

Our basic pay has gone down.

In the old scheme I was paid approx £22,500, with a bonus of £2,000 due to the high cost of living in London.  I wasn’t paid more for working nights or weekends.

Now, under AfC, I am paid £19,248 as basic pay.  I have money added for living in London.  The difference is that you receive a bonus on your pay depending on how many “unsocial hours” (nights and weekends) you work.  Due to the shift pattern I am on, my bonus is 25%.  Some people who don’t work nightshifts will have 0% bonus.

I take home more pay than I did under the old scheme (although in the long run I think I am going to be worse off because of the way the AfC ‘bandings’ work)

This month we have had our pay adjusted as we should have been paid this new rate from the deadline of October 2004.

However our ‘basic pay’ has been overpaid due to the difference between what we were paid (£22,500), and what we ‘should’ have been paid (£19248)

So that has been deducted from this months paypacket (around £3020 removed from each of us, some people for arcane reasons too complicated to go into have been deducted around £2,200).  Also deducted has been the £1,000 we were ‘advance paid’ last year.

Due to our ‘bonus’ for working unsocial hours which we haven’t been paid – I have an extra £5,137 in this months paypacket – which for me, personally makes this a good month.

My additions equal £5,137

My deductions = £4,020

My bonus for this AfC is therefore £1,117 which is added to my normal pay.  I come out on top (just).

But…

If you don’t work any unsocial hours – then you would miss out on that extra £5,137 in your packet, yet will have been deducted the £3,020 because of the reduction in our basic pay.  So I’ve heard of people taking home in total less than £800 this month.  (I’ve heard rumours of someone’s paypacket being £68.)

Also we have paid tax on the £3,020 we were ‘overpaid’ – will we be getting a tax rebate?

While our pay is ‘protected’ from being lower than it was before AfC, this doesn’t seem to count for deductions due to overpayment – although some people more legally minded than me are saying that such a ‘clawback‘ of money is against the terms and conditions of AfC.  Additionally it is believed that any reclaiming of ‘overpayment’ should be discussed with the staff four months in advance, and not sprung on us when we opened this months paypacket – it should also have been arranged so that any repayment doesn’t cause ‘undue financial hardship’.

The general thought is that the LAS accounting/management team has made a huge screw-up both legally and morally, and we are hoping that there will be a big U-turn over this pay coming soon.  Some staff are seeking advice from employment lawyers, which will make the next few days ‘interesting’ so say the least.

Morale at the moment is about as low as it can go – and this will doubtless affect our ORCON times, as who wants to come in and work overtime when you feel as if the LAS has shafted you.

The unions are remaining silent at the moment, and current belief is that they have sold us road staff down the river.

Personally, I’m fuming over decisions that have scuppered so many people on the road.

Comments are, as always, welcome especially if you think I have worked things out incorrectly – but trust me, everyone in the LAS affected by this has been working things out to be the same.

 

See – I told you I could do this without swearing.  Although there is a lot of swearing in messrooms across the capital at the moment.  I’ll update you when I know more.  Also – if my basic pay has gone down, this will affect any application I make in the future for a mortgage/loan – and I couldn’t afford a mortgage on my old pay…

The plan was perfect - we'd just taken a drunk to hospital and the patient (a 45 year old man, married, father of two) had decided to urinate in the back of our ambulance. Both my crewmate and I were happy at this, as we would have to return to our station to 'mop out', and on the way my crewmate could grab a chicken takeaway meal.

And I could get a cup of tea.

This apparently flawless plan was spoilt when we stopped for the food and a man came running out of a pub to tell me that a friend had "a f**k'in' big gash in his head", where he had fell over.

So I dutifully entered the pub, to find a fifty year old man with a cut down to the skull running from his hairline to his eyebrow. Most impressive.

Less impressive was his friend telling me that the patient had taken some 'speed' earlier.

I don't know about you, but I consider myself too old to be taking that stuff, let alone someone old enough to be my father.

Not that I've even taken speed myself. I like my braincells exactly how they are thankyewverymuch

Luckily another ambulance turned up and took the patient off our hands, and so we have returned to the station where I have just mopped out the back of the motor, and am typing this while waiting for it to dry out.

I just wish I could be a fly on the wall when our orignal drunken patient tries to explain to his wife exactly why he has pissed his trousers.


I'm preparing a post on our new pay - but it's taking a while for me to take all the swearing out of it...

An EMT killed their workmate when they ‘playfully’ shocked them with a defib.

“Joshua Philip Martin was in his fourth day on the job as a rescue-squad worker in Russell County when, in a playful mood, he decided to reach into the front seat of the ambulance and zap one of his co-workers with the defibrillator paddles. The rookie's mistake was fatal.”

A horrific story, and really beyond comment.

Via Warren Ellis.

Seven hour shifts are really easy to do, especially when you have spent the last year doing only twelve hour shifts.

The jobs tonight were pretty easy – even easier for me as I was driving the ambulance rather than treating the patients.  We had a sixteen year old girl with a sore throat, a pair of drunks, one of which had a twisted ankle, a little old lady who’d fell over indoors and had a nasty scrape to her arm, and a young woman, twelve weeks pregnant, who had been assaulted at work and struck in the stomach.

The real stand out job for me shows just how daft some people are.

The patient was a twelve year old boy.  We got the job as ‘child banging head on walls and floor’ and when we turned up the child was indeed clutching his head and hitting it against a wall.  The parents and child spoke poor English, but we easily managed to learn that the child was suffering from an earache, and that this was the cause of the head-hitting.

“How long has he had the pain?” asked my crewmate for the night.

“Five years then, three hours now,” replied the father.

We understood what he meant – the child had an earache five years ago, but this current episode, and the reason why we were called out, had lasted three hours.

“Have you given him any painkillers?”

“No,” the father looked confused.

“Do you have any painkillers?” my crewmate asked.

“Yes, but we haven’t given him any,” said the father.

So the family could see their child rolling around the floor, screaming in pain and banging his head against the walls, and didn’t consider that a painkiller might have…oh I don’t know…helped with the pain.

I can imagine the scene in the hospital when the nurses give the child some pain relief – the parents looking at each other, slapping their foreheads and saying “Doh!  We could have done that!”.

There are a lot of daft people out there – and I get to meet most of them.

The problem with having two quiet days at work is that there isn’t that much to write about.

On Saturday one of the first jobs was to someone whose name my crewmate recognised.

“He’s a nice old boy,” he told me.  “When his wife was alive she’d call us every time he coughed.  He’s deaf and blind – used to be a British champion boxer.  He’s a big fella, so I hope we don’t have to carry him downstairs.  We don’t see him much now, he hasn’t called us out in ages”.

The patient was sitting alone in his flat, scattered around him were books that he could no longer read.  In the corner was a television that probably hadn’t been turned on in years.  Just a frail man sitting quietly in his chair marking time.  On the table next to his chair was the remains of some ‘meals on wheels’.  I could see that he had once been a ‘solid’ man, like the men who worked on the docks – tall and thick with muscle.  He wasn’t that man anymore.  He was frail, shaking, and seemed nervous of everything, not something that you’d expect from an ex-boxer.

It was hard getting his history, as I needed to lean close to his ear and shout.  At one point he let out a hacking cough just as I was leaning next to him – so we took him to hospital with a possible chest infection.

Our last job of the day was back to the same address – he’d been discharged from hospital and just wanted someone to ‘check his pulse’. 

We didn’t mind.

The final job of the day was to an elderly man with learning difficulties – he’d fallen over in his warden controlled flat.  Luckily for him there were no injuries and after checking him out, we left him happily sitting in his chair.

It’s been a very enjoyable day, and I am so incredibly happy to be back on an ambulance.  But I’m bloody knackered, I need some serious sleep.

Tomorrow I’m going to be single again, and have been told that I should report to Poplar station to work with someone there.  I’ve never worked with this person before, so it should be interesting.

Nighty-night.

It’s half past three in the morning.  I need to leave for work at 6:15 but the ‘chest pain, non cardiac, poss. indigestion’ that is the revenge of last nights stir fry woke me up and refused to let me return to sleep.

It’ll be my first day back on a ‘truck’ today.  From 07:00–19:00 I’ll be whizzing around Newham in a big yellow taxi.  Probably…

…you see, my new regular crew mate has been sick for a while, and I don’t think that they will be back today.  So with any luck I’ll have a relief, or someone on overtime working with me rather than me getting sent to work at another station.  I live in hope.

It has been a while since I did a day with regular blogging updates after every job, so I’ll be posting throughout the day via my mobile phone - assuming that I do get a partner to work with me.  There may also be pictures…

…Of course it might also mean that you just read about me craving a cup of tea and whining about only having had three hours of sleep last night.

It’s in the lap of the Gods.

It was cold, it was dark and it was occasionally raining the sort of thin greasy rain that soaks straight through your clothes.  I was making my way to one of the Docklands Light Railway stations for a ‘Male – collapsed, caller not willing to approach patient’.  I’d been to this station in the last week for a hoax call and I wasn’t sure if this was a repeat performance.

At the bottom of the stairs just sheltered from the rain was a young man in his twenties, dirty, dressed in filthy clothes and curled up next to a plastic bag.  Standing over him was another man, this one dressed in a suit, he was looking a bit concerned.

The London borough of Tower Hamlets has both the richest, and the poorest population in London

“He’s just laying there, not talking”, the smartly dressed man said, “I didn’t really know what to do…”.

I let him know that I’d take care of the patient, and that he had done the right thing and could go home.

It was just me and the patient.  Given the way he looked it was a reasonable assumption that he was homeless.  If he was homeless then there was a reasonable assumption that he was drunk and given that he was in such a public place there was a chance that there was something physically wrong with him.

I tried to wake him up – he was holding his eyes closed when I tried to open them, so I knew that he wasn’t really unconscious.

“Look mate”, I said, “If you don’t open your eyes, I’ll have to check your blood sugar, which means poking a needle into your finger.  If you open your eyes then I won’t have to do that”.

No response.

So I checked his blood sugar along with the rest of his vital signs, everything was fine.

I crouched down opposite him.

“Look, you can open your eyes and talk to me you know – we’ll still take you to hospital.  To be honest, I can’t blame you, an A&E waiting room has got to be an option on a crappy night like this”.

Some commuters walked between us, they didn’t look at us.  I looked in his plastic bag, there was a sociology textbook.

“Sociology?  I could never enjoy reading that sort of thing”.

He opened his eyes, “S’all right”.

Excellent.  He was talking to me, which meant that the paranoid voice in the back of my head telling me that he might be seriously ill could shut up.  It’s something that always worries me – that despite my experience I’d miss something serious on a drunk or homeless guy.

We had a little chat while I was waiting for the ambulance to arrive.  He’d been a rough sleeper for two years, he admitted to drinking too much.  He seemed like an alright kind of person.

“Bloody freezing tonight”, I said to him, “I reckon the hospital has got to be a fair bit warmer and drier tonight”.

“I don’t want to go to hospital”, he said back to me.

I was surprised, “Are you sure mate?  It’s no skin off my nose if we take you in”.

“Yeah, I’m sure.  I’ve just had too much to drink”. He mentioned a hostel nearby, “Which way is it from here?”

So I pointed him in the direction of the hostel and he wandered off down the road.

I’ve got to admit that I felt sorry for him – I didn’t know why he was homeless, and I’m not a strong believer that all homeless people are victims, but because I’d sat and spoke to him, because he hadn’t tried to hit me and because he seemed like a reasonable person I felt some sympathy for him.  He must have made some sort of impression on me as I can still remember the job six weeks after it happened.

Maybe I’m just getting soft in my old age.

Remember when I asked you to go vote for me for the Medgadget awards?  Well I won…twice, both best Medblog, and best Literary Medblog.  Nee Naw (also London Ambulance Service) won the Best Newcomer award.  A bit of a full sweep for us London ambulance people then.  You can read about it here.

So thanks for voting for me, it’s very much appreciated.

I left work this morning with a song in my heart and joy in my step, last night was my last shift on the FRU car.

No longer will I be standing around with my hands in my pockets for 45 minutes while a six month old child lays in front of me with possible meningitis.  No more will I be told by Control to go and drive around and look busy when there is something good on telly, and no longer will my only conversation with people consist mainly of “where does it hurt?” for twelve hours straight.

I have four days off, and then from Friday I’m back to working on a ‘truck’, a nice big person carrying medical-taxi truck.

Lovely!

The Driving Instructor (frequent commenter and jolly good read) asked if I would miss the FRU.  Does this answer your question?

I was hoping that this last shift would fly by in an exciting cascade of trauma, life-saving and dramatic illness.

*ahem*

It was actually a fairly quiet night, I did seven jobs, four of them being people with coughs (one cough having lasted three weeks before he decided to call an ambulance at 5am in the morning), my last call was to an elderly gentleman with emphysema (and a cough) who actually needed hospital treatment.

However – my first two calls were to drunks.

The first call was a young man, who after having an argument with his family drank a bottle of wine and pretended to be unconscious.  We loaded him into the ambulance, and as I had a ‘funny feeling’ about the job I traveled in the ambulance with the patient and the ambulance crew.  During the transport it seemed that he took a dislike to me and opened his eyes just enough to plant a heavy slap to the inside of my leg.

I may have swore at him.

My second job was a ‘classic’ – ‘Male collapsed in street, unknown life status – caller refusing to go near patient or answer any questions’.  So I rushed round there and found two female police officers standing over a drunk male who was asleep in the street.  I did all my normal checks to makes sure that he was only drunk (as opposed to being drunk and in a diabetic coma, drunk and has had a stroke, or drunk and has been stabbed).  Everything pointed to him being just drunk.

We woke him up and were prepared to send him on his way.  He stood up – took one look at me, and smacked me in the mouth.

I ‘assisted’ him onto the floor.  The police officers and I then stopped him from injuring himself by sitting on him in a professional manner.

The police have been trained in restraint – they are all careful because they don’t want people dying of positional asphyxia.  I haven’t been trained in restraint (well not in the ambulance service) but I’m guessing that someone isn’t going to die because I’m kneeling over their arm while holding their wrist.

So we carefully restrained him (for around twenty five minutes), while he explained how he was either going to kick my head in, or sue me.  By then the police had tracked down a, now mortified, relative who came and took him away.

No damage done to me, although I would think that as he wakes up this morning he’ll have a number of bruises.  I hopped in my car, told Control that I had been assaulted twice in two jobs, so I asked if I could head back to station for a calming cup of tea – which they let me.  They also made sure that I was alright and didn’t need any other help.

As a question to any police officers reading this.  The man was drunk and had (in a minor fashion) assaulted me, and attempted to assault two police officers, yet there was a real reluctance to arrest him.  I’m wondering if this is because there would be little or no chance of there being a prosecution?  Or is there some other reason?  I’m not moaning, just curious…

When my mother found out about my being assaulted, did she ask how I was?  Did she ask if I had been hurt, or damaged?

No. 

Her comment was “At least you’ll have something interesting to blog about”.

Bloody lovely that is…