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.

It's dark and it's raining, I've managed to evade my pursuers for long enough to duck into an alley just so I can catch my breath. The party I'd come from seemed a lifetime ago.

It's my own fault that they are after me, one of the microphones caught me at it. I can remember the days when the CCTV cameras only had loudspeakers, the controllers could tell you to pick up the litter that you'd just thrown on the floor. It was hailed as a great breakthrough, a way to stop the rot of anti-social behaviour. We'd asked for it ourselves, more and more cameras to make us feel safer.

But how could you tell the threatening behaviour from visual cues alone? How could you tell if someone was making a racist remark, or planning to bomb a tube station? So they came up with the idea that if you put boom microphones on the cameras you could listen in on what people were talking about. Again, this was welcomed by the public, "It'll stop terrorism", they said, "It'll make it harder to live as an illegal immigrant".

So the people agreed.

Obviously we weren't arresting terrorists, and what police force has the resources to check anyone not speaking English as a possible illegal immigrant, so the system was overly expensive and hardly used for the purposes that it had been built for. The government wanted their money back.

I suppose that it was only a matter of time before one of the largest lobbying groups went to the government with an idea to help fund the system. It was pretty simple really, unlike the attempts to get voice or facial recognition working this was a proven technology. It was a technology lots of us had been using back in the day.

Music recognition.

Music recognition is a way in which we found out what music was playing in the bar, on the radio or over the end credits of a movie. You'd hold your phone up to the loudspeaker and after some clever 'musical DNA jiggery-pokery' it'd return with the name of the song.

It's a really clever idea especially if, like me, you'd always be tuning into the radio halfway through a song.

So the record companies lobbied to have the technology wired up to the cctv microphones - they would then be able to collect fees for the 'unauthorised broadcast or performance of copyrighted music'.

So if you hummed a copyrighted tune in front of one of these cameras it would recognise this music and flag you up on a map for the Copyright Police to come and get you. The Copyright Police were employed by the big record companies to make sure that you weren't some sort of commie-pinko copyright infringer. They were allowed to hire these 'copycops' after they were given the power to stop and search your iPod for any tracks you couldn't account for. They loved ACTA, it opened the door for all sorts of nastyness and did away with the need for a judge, or a jury of your peers.

As I say, it was my own fault. I'd been to a party and had forgotten to have my memory of the songs wiped. This meant that I had an illegal copy of the song roaming around my head, and when I'd inadvertently (and perhaps drunkenly) sung a snatch of it on the walk home I'd just confirmed myself as a pirate. I was stealing money from the grandchildren of the original artists.

As I say, the facial recognition systems are still buggy as hell, so if I managed to make it home I might be safe, I'd heard some horror stories of the Copycops wiping songs from your mind and taking half your childhood memories with it by 'accident'.

I knew I should never have joined in singing 'Happy Birthday' to my girlfriend at the party.

---

OK, so the snatch of fiction above is a bit far-fetched, but not by that much. Check out the links in the story if you don't believe me, if the political or economic will is there much of this story could become reality.

So who do we have fighting against our digital rights being curtailed? Who is it that wants you to not be seen as a thief and a criminal? Let's face it, if you have ever put one of your CDs on your MP3 player, or ripped one of your own DVDs to your laptop, then you have broken the law. If you have downloaded an illegal MP3 then you've broken the law, and it is estimated that 80% of internet users have done this.

This isn't getting into the sillier things that the record companies are trying to do.

Who is fighting for the ability to audit elections and put a stop on expensive and easily fiddled e-voting?

In 2005 I was in the room to give my pledge of £5 a month to form what would become ORG. It's £5 that I gladly spend to know that my voice is being heard.

But it's time for ORG to grow. Those of you who visit my site as opposed to those who read my RSS feed may have noticed the ORG 'Thermometer of DOOM' that has appeared on the side of this blog. We are looking to increase those £5 a month to 1,500 subscribers.

As someone who is involved in the group I'd like to ask people to put their hands into their pockets and pledge £5 a month in an effort to make sure that a future like the one described above doesn't come into effect.

If you don't believe me, take a look at their website, all their campaigns are there, what they are fighting for and the already impressive success stories that they have already caused to happen.

Here is a bribe, and one that has been taken up by other bloggers - if I can get 10 people to sign up to ORG, I will promise to write a blogpost everyday for the next 30 days.

Please. Go here and join up. for the cost of a pint and a half a month you can have dedicated and passionate people fighting on your behalf against the groups who would have you sued into bankruptcy for taping something off the telly.

If you don't believe me, hear the people themselves

Click To Play

ORG -

Disclaimer - If three people sign up because of me I'll get a T-Shirt, if I get the most new signers by November 19th I win an eeePC. That isn't why I'm doing this, it's because I strongly believe in the cause. (Of course, if you want to mention that you came to the site via me I wouldn't be upset...)

"...shouted at the paramedics who helped her. The source added: “When she came to she started mouthing off and told the ambulance crew, ‘You have to respect my privacy’. She then told them to get out."

Although, blimey, reading that copy make my teeth hurt. 'pretty 19-year-old', 'raced to the scene', 'pal'. Seriously, does anyone ever refer to people as 'pal' these days?

So, is this story in the 'public interest' and if not why does the Sun have the right to breach patient confidentiality? Because no ambulance crew would go to the press about this - we have ethical standards.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is to unveil plans to shock young people who carry knives into a greater awareness of the impact of stabbing on victims.
Her proposals include visits to hospitals where people are being treated for knife wounds.

...Because, if you'd just been stabbed there is nothing more you would like to see than a gangster (possibly from the same gang who stabbed you) standing over your bed.

The thought that it will 'shock' young people into not running around stabbing each other is incredibly misguided. The reason people run around stabbing each other is because they are in gangs.

People are in gangs because of some well understood reasons, poverty and jealousy are the main things. We've always have poverty and we've always had gangs, it's just a lot more reported on these days.

A desire to call something 'theirs' is another reason why people get into gangs, to carve out a bit of the world that is theirs.

Look at the explosive popularity of Facebook and you see people separating into tribes.

With no external threats to safety these gangs turn on each other - Nothing unites Britain at the moment and so internal strife rises.

Gang members see the rich on TV all the time, the footballers, the actors, the politicians and they want what they have - but now the problem is that they don't want to work for it, TV like Big Brother has led to children, when asked what they want to be to answer "famous".

It might seem simplistic, but working around gangs and the things that they do, going into the sink estates on a daily basis, you get a feel for what the causes are. Everyone wants to be special, everyone wants to 'belong, and because they aren't special, or because they feel alienated, some people turn to tribalism and crime.

I was talking to a police officer about a particularly nasty piece of work the other day, he couldn't understand why some people in poverty turn to crime while the majority of people don't. And if he doesn't know, I'm damn sure the politicians don't either.

Young people today are invulnerable, they have never been disciplined effectively so they think that nothing can touch them. When I see the police arresting someone, all I can hear is the suspect shouting, "You can't arrest me!". The response to a teacher disciplining a pupil is almost always, "I know my rights". No-one has ever told these children "No". Parents don't chastise their children when they misbehave in the supermarket, so why would they discipline them for other things at home.

We are reaping what we have sowed in becoming a more permissive society in the 70's, 80's and 90's. You have to ask yourself if the cost to society for our permissiveness is too much.

That's what you have to treat, not the symptom, the knives, but the causes. You don't treat meningitis by trying to get rid of the rash, you treat it by getting rid of the infection.

But of course, that isn't an easy and quick fix, and it goes a lot deeper than the politicians would like to admit.

Look at the perpetrators and victims of knife killings, most of them are black youngsters - is this a coincidence? By saying that people can be 'shocked' out of carrying a knife they must be saying that black people don't normally think of their victims and this is how to 'uplift' them into changing. This, of course, is utter drivel.

Human beings have been killing each other for years, why should we suddenly stop? Have our brains evolved overnight to find killing abhorrent? I would suggest not, we are no different than we were 1000 years ago, or even 70 years ago.

But of course, politics is all about 'quick fixes', and I foresee new and 'improved' laws to deal with this surge in knife crimes. It won't fix anything and the crimes will eventually fall out of the media's gaze and turn to something else. The killings will go on, but less people will be interested and it will fade, once more, into the background.

Until then I'm guessing that we will have to endure more rapid and ill thought out legislation, and no increase in the infrastructure to enforce it.

Normal service will be resumed.

---

Please excuse this post, it's a stream of consciousness thing and I really should have tidied it up, and had some sort of point, before posting it. Oh, and has anyone ever noticed how short the paragraphs are on the BBC News website?

A hospital has admitted clamping ambulances for parking infringements and charging £50 for their release.
Security staff at King's College Hospital, south London, are clamping the non-emergency ambulances for spending too long in drop-off bays.

These ambulances are privately run ambulances who took up the contracts for patient transport. This is something that the LAS used to do in London, but then with the sneaking privatisation of the NHS the private companies started to do things cheaper and so the LAS lost a lot of these contracts.

They have, as far as I know, no exemptions to where they can park (unlike us proper emergency ambulances).

I'm not quite sure how "They clamp ambulances parked for more than an hour "to allow other vehicles into the area," works though, surely if they are clamped then they are still blocking the area?

I don't know, I'm an ambulance driver, not an ambulance parker. And if you've ever seen me park, that much is pretty obvious.

A woman has said she was left in agony when an ambulance took three hours to respond to a 999 call after a fall.
A spokesperson for East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) said: "We don't have sufficient time to look into the detail to respond to this."
"EMAS is a 24/7 service. We answer 500,000 emergency calls per annum and that's our priority."

(My emphasis)

Wow...

I never thought I'd hear an ambulance service say this. I guess that the person on the other end of the phone to the reporter was having a really bad day.

I wonder if this means I can get away with telling a patient that, "I don't have time to deal with your cut finger".

(My back of a fag packet numbers for London is that we have over 1.2 million calls a year, I'm sure the official figures are out there someone but I can't be bothered to look them up. I'm working in a few hours and yes, I know we have more ambulances than EMAS).

Ambulance 'loses way' to hospital
Ambulance drivers are to get additional training after a vehicle got lost as it was taking a woman to hospital, who later died.In a statement East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) said: "During the journey... the ambulance satellite navigation system failed and the driver, who usually operates in the Skegness area, took a wrong turn.
"This was realised and the crew member in the rear of the vehicle, who was familiar with the area, was able to direct the driver back on course.

I rely on the Sat-nav system on my ambulance - not so much if I'm working in my area, but if I'm elsewhere in London then I'm like a fish out of water.

Strange hospitals are the worst as I keep circling the area trying to find the A&E department.

If I do a transfer to a hospital outside of East London, there is then a big chance that I'll get another job in the area. I don't have 'the knowledge' so end up following the sat-nav or relying on one of our mapbooks.

This is a tragedy, but despite this it is a bit of a non-story in my opinion, someone from outside of the area took a wrong turn, it was corrected and they found the hospital. That the father of the patient reached the hospital 15 minutes earlier isn't unusual - I'm often beaten to hospital by relatives 'following' in the car, partly because we do various things before we leave the scene and partly because I don't drive like a loon with a patient in the back. Ambulances have different handling to cars and so we'll often drive slower.

If someone could tell me how 'better trained' can be implemented in order to make sure that when driving in an unusual area with a failed navigation system the driver never takes a wrong turn I'm sure every service in the country would be grateful.

And yes, I've taken a wrong turn or two myself and had to rely on the experience and knowledge of my partner to help me out, and I've done the same for people who have worked with me. It's why a good ambulance crew is a team.

And not being able to find a place can be one of the worse things that happens to you - as this example from the archives shows.

I got a job, '14 month child, floppy and lifeless'.
The address was given as 'Flat 1, Rose house, Starling road'.
I sped up and down the road. I spotted some of the names of the flats in tiny writing, on little blue plaques many of them pointing away from the road. My pulse started to rise. It had taken me four minutes to reach the area, but how much longer would it take me to locate the potentially very sick child?
I found 'Lilac House', 'Lily House' and 'Tulip House', but I couldn't find 'Rose House'.
Now I was starting to panic.