I've spoken before on the 'Connecting for Health' IT project, its something that frankly gives me the willies; a huge database of all your medical details that has shockingly bad security measures.

(I've spoken to people working on the system, and trust me, it's horrendously insecure).

They are having a consultation process on the use of your medical information, which you can take part in on-line.

NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CFH) is conducting a consultation with the public and healthcare professionals on the use of patient information for purposes such as health research and managing and planning care.

The health and well-being of the population can be improved by activities such as medical research, disease surveillance, screening, needs assessment and preventative activities.

NHS CFH is keen to obtain the views of the general public, patients and other interested parties on how patient information held by the NHS should be used for additional purposes such as research.

I suggest that everyone in the UK has a look at it.

From the Open Rights Group mailing list I'm part of, someone has made the following point.

Note that the survey more than once claims that patients have no legal right to control information they have given the NHS about themselves once it has been anonymised.

As a matter of law this is nonsense.

Information given in confidence may not be used or disclosed except for the purpose for which it was supplied unless the supplier consents, and this is not changed by removing the supplier's name. So I hope responders will challenge this (and perhaps also the blithe claim that
anonymisation only fails in the case of people with very rare diseases, which greatly understates the risk that an aggregation of conditions,
dates and places will identify someone just as plainly as a name and address).

This is just exactly the sort of function creep that I mentioned in the previous post, please go and have your own say about your data being used in this fashion.

Oh, and you folks do me proud. If anyone else wants to join up (I do recommend it, I'm a proud supporter, and you can see the sorts of bright people we have involved) you can find out more here. These folks do good work that you can help support for less than the price of two pints of lager.

A paramedic who tackled a wheelchair-bound gunman has been hailed a hero.
Garry Perkins was honoured for his bravery by a crown court judge after he and a colleague came face-to-face with the armed man during a routine call-out.
But when they arrived at the house the two paramedics found Ian Wilson, who has no legs, sitting in his wheelchair asking for morphine.
But while Mr Perkins called the man’s GP, he noticed a gun on a radiator.
He said: “We both saw it and looked at each other, then the man produced a gun from down the side of his wheelchair and pointed it at John, smiling.

Myself? I would have either thrown him the drugs and told him to take them all at once - then call out the armed police, or just run.

That the man was in a wheelchair is neither here nor there, you can shoot from a wheelchair as numerous paralympic medal-winners have shown. I've also known wheelchair users who have run quite successful drug dealing businesses.

I particularly like one of the comments left on the site that says,

I have had the dubious 'pleasure' of having met Mr Wilson as a result of my job, and although on the face of it, it is hard to believe that a man with no legs, and confined to his wheelchair could be a threat to anyone,believe me he is a very threatening, aggressive and thoroughly odious little man. Good work from the Paramedics.

Just a snapshot of the sorts of things we can walk into.

Many thanks to the reader who sent me this story.

In the eyes of the government this is a 'successful' job.

For the patient, for the parents, for the staff involved, for everyone that matters - this is not a successful job.

If ambulance services weren't chasing government targets then this may well have been a 'unsuccessful' job for the government - but a success for everyone else.

A patient held up an ambulance at gunpoint and threatened to kill its crew before taking the emergency vehicle and crashing it into five cars, the Standard has learned.
The man allegedly pulled a gun on the terrified crew before crashing the ambulance into the cars, one of which was shunted into the front of a house.
It is thought the trouble may have been sparked by the patient's unhappiness at the choice of hospital.

This is near where I live.

I hope the crew involved is alright.

I just goes to show some of the dangers all emergency services staff face on a daily basis. I'd bet that the criminal who did this won't be forced to pay for the damage that he did to the ambulance, let alone the private cars.

Now... what's the tariff for threatening someone with a firearm?

I've had a crappy day and I get home to find a couple of people have sent this story to me. (And thanks to all those people, I would have missed it otherwise).

A paramedic has been criticised for not cutting short a break to help a woman who had suffered a heart attack.
Catherine Cowie, 50, died two days after collapsing in Fraserburgh.
An ambulance technician was on the scene within four minutes, but a paramedic did not attend with him because he was on a lunch break.
Some cardiac drugs can only be administered by a paramedic. The Scottish Ambulance Service said staff could not be disturbed during breaks.
However, it said staff could choose whether or not to attend calls during break periods.

Well.

Can someone please explain how 'staff could not be disturbed during breaks.' and 'staff could choose whether or not to attend calls during break periods.' can both be in effect?

In London it's quite simple if you get a break* then the first part of it is sacrosanct, with a 45 minute break that's the first half an hour. Then the last third of the break is interruptible. If a high priority call comes in during this time then Control can choose to end your break early. Unless Control chose to do this, the crew having the break have no idea that a call is waiting for them.

There is a lot of other weird stuff in this story that just doesn't sound correct - but then, few people understand the bizarre workings of an ambulance trust, and that includes some of the staff**

And of course I'd like to see the person who wrote this article work without a break for twelve hours while dealing with some of the awful things we have to do. And that means no cups of tea and no hot meals, or if you are lucky then you can get a dodgy takeaway while dodging Control. And having to use the toilets at hospital that patients with infectious diarrhoea have been using. And doing that every day of your working life.

If this story were really as written then I suspect that the Paramedic involved would be thrown to the wolves for 'denying a member of the public an ambulance'.

What next? 'My relative died because Paramedic was off duty'?

Remember people - if you are picked up by an ambulance and die two days afterwards while in hospital then it's all the fault of the ambulance service...

I'm sadly getting used to this attitude that ambulance staff aren't actually human.

*And really, I'm not convinced that the LAS aren't breaking the law by not enforcing break periods, instead paying us an extra £10 if we don't get a break.

**...And all the managers...

More data lost from the NHS.

"Discs containing personal information on almost 18,000 NHS staff have gone missing from a north London hospital.
Whittington Hospital NHS Trust admitted the discs were lost when they were put in the post by mistake in late July."

I've worked at the Whittington A&E department in my nursing days and it's worrying to think that there is enough data now floating out there, lost, to comprehensively steal people's identity.

These details could be used to impersonate a nurse. A nurse that might have access to vulnerable patients.

Of course, when the NHS has all your details on a centralised system there will be 'policies and procedures' in place to prevent this sort of data loss happening. Just as the policies in place managed to prevent this data loss.

Oh wait, they didn't.

On a technical side, it would be much more secure to encrypt the data and send it via the internet than to burn it to media and send it by post or courier.

It's been a long two or so weeks - lots of shifts with some nasty changes (getting up at 12am for some shifts then less than 48 hours later having to get up at 5am, changing shifts 'backwards' is awful). Add in hardly doing a 'decent' job for a month or two and coping with the management led changes that are causing morale to plummet and it's easy to see why I'm incredibly grateful to be off work for a few days.

Before starting Friday, Saturday, Sunday night-shifts.

Rather than bore you with lots of posts about how bad it is getting I thought I'd keep my moans all short and put them together in one post.

As an example of the sorts of calls that I've been running on blue lights to, with a FRU already in attendance, include a blocked nose and someone with an earache. These then get categorised as 'Cat A' rapid responses - surely this is proof that the computer system which triages these calls is not fit for purpose. Giving everything a high priority is not triage, it's arse-covering.

I'm going to start testing people's eyes soon as part of my assessment - stand them on their doorstep and ask them if they can read the writing on the side of the ambulance, you know, the bit that says 'Emergency Ambulance'...

The blocked nose and earache calls weren't even the normal 'demographic', young wimpish men, they were calls from people who should know better.

Due to 'Call connect' jobs are being sent down to us half-formed. Nothing but an address with no indication of what is wrong with a patient. I refuse to drive on blue lights to these jobs until they give us more information - I'm not going to turn up somewhere without any idea how dangerous it is. Imagine being sent to someone who has been stabbed by a mad family member, knocking on the door and being greeted by someone with a bloodstained knife.

This dangerous practice is due, once more, to the governmental target needing to be met rather than any actual clinical need.

If this job was based on clinical need I'd not be blue-lighting it to blocked noses, yet trundling down the road to elderly patients who have been on the floor all night with a broken hip.

Active Area Cover (AAC) continues to be a farce, as if a computer can predict where the next call comes from when there is a population density as high as in London. Only the other day I returned to station after being out all shift, behind me was another ambulance. We hadn't even opened the front door to the station when the phone started ringing to tell us both we had to turn around and start driving around.

I was told to go to a point 0.7 miles away from the station.

To say that I was fuming that I wouldn't even be able to get a cup of tea would be putting it mildly. So instead I found myself sitting in a cramped cab in the rain only to have to drive back past my station on the very next call.

What irritates me even more is knowing that the people who order us out to roam around are sitting in a nice comfortable office drinking tea and eating biscuits while clapping themselves on the back for a 'job well done'. And they get paid more than me.

Our stock of equipment has been of it's usual high quality, in the last two weeks I have been out on an ambulance with...

• No scoop stretcher
• No drug pack
• No reagent sticks for measuring blood sugars
• No blood pressure cuff
• No working ECG leads

And

• No oxygen masks

Good job I hardly ever go to anyone who is actually 'sick'.

When I first joined this job, staff morale wasn't too bad, it has now plummeted. This can be the best job in the world, but the changes that are brought in for no reason other than to make some governmental minister happy are destroying the job. To them a successful job is getting two resources to the earache within eight minutes, while ignoring the hypothermic broken hip patient. to them a success is 'doing something', even though there is no evidence that it makes things work any better - after all no-one was ever re-elected by doing nothing to a service even though it works well - you have to 'stamp your mark' don't you know.

It also doesn't matter if you get to a job and can't give the patient oxygen, as that doesn't impact the all important eight minute target.

Expect to see more of this sort of thing and be under no illusions, as far as the government is concerned this is a 'successful' job, because the FRU got there in under eight minutes - it's one of the many reasons why I came off the FRU.