Jacqui Smith says public demand means people will be able to pre-register for an ID card within the next few months.
The cards will be available for all from 2012 but she said: "I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long."

The fuck!?

"Please Jacqui - let me pay you £30 or more so that you can store my data on a huge database that will almost certainly not go missing (unlike many, many other cases of dataloss) all so that you can catch those nasty, nasty terrorists. I'm more than happy to have £50.1 billion of my tax money going into this scheme rather than into, I dunno, the NHS".

When is it we can get to vote this shower of fools out of government?

Here is my statement of intent :

I refuse to carry any national ID card that is based around a national database and would rather go to prison than submit to this attack on my privacy and security. They will have to get my biometric data* by force and I will shred any ID card of this type that I am sent.

I would rather emigrate (And I love London and the UK) than be forced into this scheme of waste and evil. I will vote for any political party that guarantees scrapping this white elephant.

*Which is still hideously flawed and throws up too many false positives and negatives. To be fully informed please visit No 2 ID.

(You can click through to Flickr to see the notes that I've added to my notes)

Just some notes that I made before going on Radio 5 Live to talk about this story.

Donal MacIntyre devoted part of his radio programme to it (and you can download and listen to it here, I don't know how long it will last).

So I got on the radio and said a few words (here for a few days - the section starts 1:03 in and again I suspect it only lasts a few days and won't let nasty foreign types listen to it).

But I didn't get a chance to say as much as I wanted to. But I have an audience here - so here goes...

Sadly we don't tend to flag addresses for people who are just verbally abusive to us, as I said in the radio segment, I'm working next Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights and I fully expect to be sworn at on every one of those shifts. If I were to fill in forms for that sort of abuse I'd never get any work done. Instead we fill in the forms for those people who have either physically abused us, or have acted in such a way that there is a high chance of them physically abusing people in the future.

We fill out the form, explaining why we are flagging it as a dangerous address and then fax it off to Control (using the hospital fax machine, our station doesn't have anything so high tech as a fax machine...)

So the dangerous addresses are flagged by people who have actually been there. And trust me, if someone dies as a result of a delay by us waiting for the police, the person initially flagging the address will get some serious questions asked.

The flagged address system is a warning system, it informs and compliments our 'at scene' risk assessment. Sometimes we ignore it, sometimes we wait for the police. It all depends on the situation. If someone is reported as not breathing then we'll probably go in, if they are calling because someone in the house is drunk then we are more likely to wait for the police. An example of when it was right to enter the address is this one, while in this example it was right for me to wait outside for police assistance.

It's that sort of risk assessment that we make all the time, often without consciously thinking about it.

The address is reviewed every six months, taken off the register if there have been no further reports, at least that is how it was explained to me.

So why are people violent towards us? Obviously drink and drugs play a huge part, mostly drink. But I think that there is a more subtle thing in action here.

When I wear my uniform people do as I say, they don't see me as a slightly overweight bloke - they see me as a figure of authority, that I know what I'm doing and that it is in that person's best interests to do as I suggest. Conversely, the uniform dehumanises me - it makes me a 'thing' rather than a person and it's much easier to hit someone if you think about them as just being a 'uniform' rather than a living, thinking, feeling human being.

A lot of arguments are started because of the raised expectations of people to be looked after by the state, they don't want to wait for their treatment and they want an instant cure - this is why I would suggest that actual violence against staff is higher in A&E departments, although they do have security guards posted there now.

The dangers for ambulance staff have only increased - there are more solo responders now, and they go into situations where the police would turn up mob-handed. While solo's aren't supposed to be sent to assault cases on their own, I know that I attended a fair share of such things - often waiting ages for a proper ambulance to arrive. I remember one stabbing I was sent on and it took forty minutes for the ambulance to arrive. I'm just glad that the assailant didn't return to finish off the job he'd started.

The other huge danger is Call Connect.

Due to "call connect", the government's new way of measuring the "success" of ambulance trusts, we are finding ourselves going into houses without any idea of the possible dangers. Once we are out of the ambulance, there is no way for control to contact the crew.

The new 'Airwave' radios have been delayed, so there is still no way for Control to contact us once we are out of the ambulance. We are often sent calls that just give the address.

An example,

I'm sent a call to a house I'm just driving up to - no further information is given. If I'd got out of the vehicle then I would have been met by a house full of drunks, one of whom had been cutting herself open with a kitchen knife and was arguing with the other occupants. Thankfully I don't give a damn about the government's ORCON target so I waited until more information came down - then waited for the police. If I hadn't done that there was a good chance that I wouldn't be here today writing this post.

To be honest, I would be very surprised if an ambulance person isn't killed in service before the end of next year.

Edited to add that I found the Unison's comments in the original BBC story particularly unhelpful, seeming to care more for the people who hit us than the members of their own union, then realising that there was a fence that they had to go and sit on.

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...