I've reached that point in my blogging career where if an ambulance story is in the media I'm phoned up to provide comment.
So this BBC article about solo responders and the concerns about using them so extensively has already had me woken up by one newspaper.
I don't mind - after all it's something I've been shouting about on this blog for ages. Please remember though that I'm just a worker on the road, if you want real information you should talk to the LAS Press office 020 7921 5113 (and who are a bunch of top folks by the way).
Still it is nice to have something that I'm concerned about in the news. For more on this subject you may want to check out the following links.
A simple description of ORCON (The government target we are desperate to meet)
Why I think that splitting crewed ambulances to man solo responders is a bad idea for patient safety.
Where I describe the plan to increase solo responders and decrease double crewed ambulances. (I'm a lot less enamoured of the idea now than when I wrote this).
One concern for staff and patient safety that often isn't thought of.
My solution to the 'target' question that will actually benefit patient care.
To summarise things as I see them (and remember - these are my views alone, not those of my employer).
The government wants to measure the performance of ambulance trusts. The main way of doing this is to see how many of our 'high priority' calls we get to in under eight minutes. There are often more calls than there are ambulances, so solo responders effectively double your workforce with respect to reaching this target. Once a responder reaches a patient, the clock stops.
Solo responders can't safely transport patients. They also are unhappy to leave people at home because they are scared they will die. Solo responders therefore can spend a lot of time at scene waiting for a double crewed ambulance to arrive.
Sick people need to be in hospital - it is better to get there in nine minutes and be able to transport them than to get there in seven and have to wait half an hour for a proper 'truck'. The government does not agree.
The eight minute target is from research over 20 years old - and it only deals with cardiac arrest patients, not with 'high priority' calls. The department of health has no copies of the ORCON paper on record -although there is one in the British library. Modern research says that eight minutes is too long to get to a cardiac arrest.
Although our ORCON response percentage in London is roughly the same as has been every year, our cardiac arrest survival rate has more than tripled. Doesn't this show that other initiatives (which aren't tallied up by the government) are far more important?
Getting to patients quickly is never a bad idea, but in concentrating resources on solo responders at the expense of double-crewed ambulances I firmly believe negatively impacts patient care. Sick people need to be in hospital.
In London we are about to start running community responder posts - first-aiders from the public sent to calls. This is so deeply wrong that I can't get my head around it. Again I suspect that this is to help us meet these targets. It's not like we are in the wilds of Scotland where it physically takes you an hour to get from one place to another.
This is just the beginning of the discussion - the plan is to have all but the most serious calls (like confirmed cardiac arrest) attended to by just a solo responder, a double-crewed ambulance won't be sent - once the solo is on the scene they will make the decision as to the patient needing an ambulance to transport them, or if they need a GP, or can make their own way to hospital.
The simple solution is that we need more ambulances and more ambulance crews - but the government won't reach into their pocket and give us what we need, so instead the ambulance trusts have to make these difficult decisions.
It's not the ambulance trusts fault that we are heading down the solo responder route - it's purely the government's focus on this out-of-date target and lack of motivation to give us the funding we need to continue giving Londoners the care that they expect.
Oh and people call us for utter rubbish like veruccas - which is why we are under so much strain at the moment.
I'm hoping that this will run and run and might cause some form of change - unfortunately I suspect that this story will soon be ignored because of some celebrity drug 'sensation' or we find someone else who has faked their own death.
