Demonstrations are expected as one of the world's largest arms fairs opens in London's Docklands later.

The biennial Defence Systems and Equipment International is due to take place amid tight security.

Activists from a separate group, Disarm DSEI, will hold another protest and warn they will target the banks and firms which invest in the industry. The group also says it will not co-operate with police ahead of its demonstration.

Yep.

My patch.

Loads of people, some of them perhaps reasonably annoyed.

Quite a few police, some bodyguards.

If the police do some kettling there could be a fair few collapses/illnesses/injuries.*

So you would think that we in the LAS would have some sort of plan, something that those of us working in the area would be privy to.

I've not seen a single memo, bulletin, policy or plan concerning this.

However in the latest bulletin I have learnt that the 'Equality and Diversity' department is changing it's name to 'Equality and Inclusion' (something to do with the future).

Oh well, it'll be interesting seeing how the next few days play out.

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I'm not saying that there isn't a plan, just that I'm completely unaware of it - and the officer I spoke to yesterday was also unaware of any plan.

*Stationary kettling is, in my opinion, a bloody stupid idea and probably against the law.

A round up of recent media stories about ambulances and the talk of the ambulance loading bay at the hospital the other night.

Dozens of patients were removed from hospital wards after two ambulances caught fire and exploded.

I'm glad there were only minor injuries.

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Bottle thrown at ambulance on emergency call

“We were on blue lights on the way to a call and we heard an explosion. The next thing we were covered in glass – it was everywhere”

Ambulance bicycles stolen in the City

The London Ambulance Service is appealing for the return of two cycle response pushbikes after they were stolen from outside the home of a patient in Finsbury. The custom-built Specialized Rockhopper mountain bikes were taken yesterday evening (Wednesday) from Joseph Trotter Close, EC1, after staff had been called to attend a man who was unwell.

Which sort of sums up how some 'members of the community' treat ambulance services.

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Woman Dies In Pub After Paramedic 'Delay'

Then there is this, which is very sad - but I know that there are certain pubs in my area that I hate going into because, well, people get killed in them. Once more it's a case of 'blame the person who wants to survive their shift'. And once more, as usual, the blame is being put on 'health and safety' - at which point I'd like to tell those commenters that if they would like to live without health and safety legislation I'll be seeing them later in the back of my ambulance.

This sort of story is happening more and more - I really should just do one blog-post that I can refer to when another similar story happens.

Incidentally, can someone explain the laws of grammar that have newspapers 'quoting' their own stories? I always read it as indicating sarcasm.

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The current gossip outside the A&E department the other night was how there is a local estate where someone seems to have taken a shine to shooting at ambulance crews with an air pistol. Apparently the official advice is that if you get a call there the crew should wear their stab vest and safety helmet.

This is the sort of 'welcome' that we are dealing with.

A school has installed CCTV cameras in classrooms in a bid to avoid disputes between teachers and pupils and to tackle theft, the deputy head has said.

Mr Rush said that the reaction from staff, children and parents had been entirely supportive.

"The children are very happy here because they know they are on a school site where they are safe.

And this is the problem, that children 'feel safe' because they are under the watchful eye of a CCTV camera. They are being trained to believe that.

Likewise they are being trained that it is only right that your fingerprints can be taken so that you can borrow books from a library, that carrying ID cards is the norm and that you should feel safe now that you are put on a database as soon as you are born.

State control of your data is increasing and they people concerned have realised that 'getting them while they are young' seems to be the easiest way to slip these databases and surveillance systems in to place.

Seriously, look at the responses to the library fingerprints link - shouldn't we be concerned that we are creating children who will accept anything for the sake of 'safety'?

The question therefore is what can we do to educate children about the flaws in such systems?

My immediate thought is to make Orwell's '1984' and Doctorow's 'Little Brother' compulsory English texts. But what else? Perhaps ORG/FIPR/No2ID should start setting out their stalls at school fetes, and town shows, or start making child friendly websites?

But what else can we do?

I'm open for suggestions.

(And the first person to say that 'if you've nothing to hide then you've nothing to fear' will have their net curtains removed, their walls replaced with glass and be made to sign a declaration stating that they trust this, and all other future governments, as well as every soul that works for the civil service, the NHS, social services, transport your local council etc...)

What has happened here is tragically sad and my sympathies go out to the family.

A GRANDAD lay dying of a heart attack in his home — while a paramedic stood outside for 16 minutes filling in risk-assessment forms.

And last night Roy Adams’s heartbroken daughter Sarah claimed he would still be alive if there had not been a delay.

She added: “It’s awful. The medic could have saved my dad but instead he stood outside for 16 minutes. All that crucial time was wasted.”

I'm yet to see a 'Health and Safety' form that we fill in on the road - yet more 'Sun' exaggeration. But then they do seem to have a real hatred of people actually being safe at work.

When I was working solo, you made your 'health and safety' assessment in your head - if it felt safe to enter on your own then you would enter, if there was something about the call that made you nervous, then you would wait for backup. From the story in the newspaper, it would seem that the solo thought it was unsafe to enter - but after waiting sixteen minutes for a police escort to arrive, decided to enter on their own.

Probably what happened was that the solo wasn't happy to enter on their own for whatever reason, waited for the police and after they didn't turn up for a while entered the household at their own risk.

From the Times Online article about the same job.

The ambulance service spokesman described the risk assessment as a “mental checklist” which included considering the safety of the scene, types of risk and whether extra help or equipment was required.

“We have a duty of care to treat patients but we also have to look after our staff,” he said. “In this case the medic conducted the assessment, had safety concerns and decided to call for back-up.”

Well done that 'spokesman' for getting the real situation across to at least one paper (even if it is the toilet paper 'The Times')

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But it's not just about the poor reporting - what really sticks in my throat is the comments by the Great British Public who take the rubbish that is printed in the Sun as gospel. When every story becomes a trial by media it's interesting how quickly people are to judge something based on 380 words that they have read in a tabloid paper.

this idiot should be given life in prison

This medic should be struck off straight away, no questions ...

Typical Britain today,what a b****y disgrace, everything is Health and Safety, Hitlerite jobsworths ...

These people want us to risk our lives to save them when they make comments like that? What next? Moaning because I have two perfectly good kidneys and I should give one of them up for transplant so that someone else can live? Offering to be stabbed in place of someone else because we 'save lives' and are 'paid for it'?

How many of these commentors, after seeing the damage a knife can cause, would volunteer to walk into a place where there is a real fear of losing your life. They are very brave sitting behind their keyboards, but I bet they couldn't walk a mile in our boots.

And calling us 'Hitlerite' - well, I hope that whoever made that comment makes that viewpoint known to any ambulance crew that comes to help you in the future...

I do despair sometimes.

And should the Solo be vindicated, how many column inches would the Sun spend on that?

'Swine flu', which for those following me on Twitter, seems to be one of the things I'm encountering more and more often these days. Let me explain some of the ways in which it is impacting my working life of late.

• While the government leaflet says that masks offer no protection from the 'flu, our latest flowchart for dealing with it mentions not only masks, but also aprons and gloves. We have gone from having a pair of masks and a pair of aprons in our infection control kit to having as many masks as you want. To be fair we did have to steal resource masks from the hospitals that we went to at the start of this outbreak, but supply problems seem to have been sorted out.
• Our call rate has gone from the normal 4,200-4,500 calls per day to around 5,200-5,700 in the last few days. This is an increase of around 26% Rather obviously this is having us run ragged. I have no idea if our sickness rate has increased (with staff being off with the Death Plague). What this has done is raise our DEFCOM level to 4. Which I don't think makes a huge difference to those of us on the road.
• Hospitals are refusing to see Swine 'flu patients unless they are incredibly unwell. I was nearly turned away from the hospital when taking in a woman with vaginal bleeding and dizziness because she had possible Swine 'flu. Do GPs do vaginal examinations and diagnosis? Or would this woman have been sent in by the GP anyway (given some of the... 'quality' GPs we have in my area it wouldn't surprise me if she were just sent up to the hospital without an examination). There is huge paranoia about letting anyone with a high temperature and the sniffles within hospital grounds. My question is, will hospitals be turning patients away in the Winter when the more dangerous 'flus are epidemic?
• We are seeing plenty of people who call us for Swine 'flu symptoms, as well as those who just mention 'chest pain' to our calltakers - thus guaranteeing an ambulance response. Quite a lot of people think that Swine 'flu is a death sentence even though this particular strain of 'flu seems to be a lot less dangerous than the normal seasonal 'flus.
• We have the normal increasing number of people collapsing from the heat - often their first thought is that they are dying of Swine 'flu.
• We are being told to leave people at home to look after themselves (heh, people actually looking after themselves, whatever fantasy scenario will our people think of next); this makes us ambulance staff somewhat nervous - after all there is the perception (if not the fact) that leaving people at home will only have us losing our jobs when someone dies.
• An example of one of our 'clients' - she called four ambulances over four days as her child has Swine 'flu, which isn't 'getting any better', despite being told that it can take over a week to feel better. Needless to say the child involved is fine if a bit generally unwell - certainly nothing that requires hospital treatment. Multiply this by the number of people across London and you can see one more reason why the number of calls is raised.

So, lots of panic, lots of fear, lots of misinformation along with the normal misuse of the ambulance service has resulted in many more calls for us, which then results in delays for people actually needing treatment. For example the police were with an assault patient for an hour waiting for an ambulance to arrive.

Unfortunately there isn't much that we can do, we can't suddenly make the public realise that they may be capable of looking after themselves without us holding their hands - and we can't magic up new ambulance staff from nowhere.

Except maybe get all the officers (that were road trained) up in Waterloo Control to man resource up trucks and get out on the road - I'm sure that for a few weeks we can do without the assistant staff officer to the staff officer for the diversity department* (or similar) and that they might be more use on the road at the moment.

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*I have no idea if this is a genuine position, although it sounds about right - I couldn't tell you how many levels of management there are between me and my boss, nor all the 'performance improvement' staff that float around up there in Waterloo.

First off, apologies for the lack of blogging, but I've been working a 60 hour week, coupled with a two day conference and other stuff (including being contacted a lot about Nightjack - about which I appeared on Channel 4 news, but which I, myself, missed.)

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I was woken from my sleep by a text message from a friend telling me that I was in the News of the World. As far as I know the publishers hadn't planned anything with them so it was a bit of a surprise.

He sent me this picture of the article.

I was somewhat perturbed. Actually I was flaming furious. You see, despite the mistakes, it also implies other things.

For comparison you can read the original post here.

Firstly, I didn't say anything, I wrote it. Over three years ago. Hardly news. I'm also not based at the Royal London hospital - we have these things we call ambulance stations. And they get the name of the book wrong. So far not exactly quality reporting.

(And why I do have more than one blog, I think they are mixing up 'blogs' and 'posts', which while annoying is perhaps a little petty to bring up)

The ambulance arrived and took the baby to hospital (sorry 'brain bug tot'), the baby didn't travel in the neighbour's car at all.

The implication is that the baby definitely had meningitis (which it didn't) where in the actual article I try to show that it isn't meningitis. Also things have changed for the better and FRUs are waiting on scene for long times a lot less often than when I did it.

I would guess that the News of the World got hold of a copy of my book - reached page four (where this story is printed) and got no further because they smelled something they could get outraged about. Rather than, say, doing some work and seeing how busy the ambulances were that day (three years ago).

While I've never expected quality journalism from the redtops, it still surprised me how easily they twisted the facts to say what they wanted to say, while getting even the basics wrong.

The sad thing is that this sort of coverage will probably make my bosses look a little less favourably upon me, even though I had nothing to do with the paper printing it, or with putting their own spin on things.

Notes on the Nightjack verdict, written in haste, in anger, and unedited (because I'm knackered and I have no time to do it justice. My apologies - I think I made more sense when speaking to a Guardian journalist about it)

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When I started writing this blog I made some effort at remaining anonymous, it wasn't a big effort mind you, but it involved writing under a pseudonym and not shouting about it in the messroom. When my real name was found out I discovered that I was very lucky, that the communications department of the LAS didn't want to come gunning for my job.

There are laws that protect you should you wish to 'whistleblow', if someone is doing something illegal or immoral then you can be protected if you brig it to someone else's attention. Of course, in the real world, that 'protection' is only as good as the lawyers you can hire to fight for those protections.

A lot of what bloggers bring to light is the chronic state of the their day to day life - a classic example would be police bloggers letting us know about how much administration that they must fill in whenever they make an arrest. Part of what I write about is to highlight the flaws in the governmental running of the NHS. Other bloggers do this more than me.

What bloggers do is humanise and explain their section of the world - public sector bodies do well to have bloggers writing within them, after all these are the people who care about what they do, about what improvements should be made and about where the faults come from. They highlight these things in the hopes that, in bringing this information into the public consciousness, they can effect a change that they would otherwise be powerless to bring about.

Anonymity provides a protection against vindictiveness from management who would rather do nothing than repeat the party-line, or lie, that everything is perfect, there is no cause for concern. Having seen management do, essentially illegal things, in order to persecute and victimise staff - anonymity is a way of protecting your mortgage payments.

It is not just for bloggers this protection of anonymity - consider a support forum for people with mental health problems, anonymity allows these user to perhaps be more open, more honest and more themselves then they would do were they forced to reveal their own identities. It is the nature of the internet that our identities are fluid.

Perhaps that can be the Times next 'scoop', tracking down the people behind anonymous forums in the cause of 'public interest'.

Journalists work to protect their sources, some ending up in prison over their refusal to breach the privacy of their sources. This is right and proper.

So - when Judge Eady told the Times that they could breach the privacy of the police blogger Nightjack, it has lead to a very real fear of what this means for the rest of us.

The thought that Nightjack breached laws on writing about criminal cases (when the details are all in the public domain post-trial) seems petty, and if he did indeed compromise trials then why is his force only giving him a written warning rather than prosecuting him?

I won't dwell on the 'public interest' of unveiling bloggers, they have done it before in utterly despicable ways and for some reason it seems to be their 'cause' - were I vindictive I'd be looking into their expense accounts right now for some justified retribution. Or googlebombing them as a bunch of tossers.

Instead I'm mindful that a lot of exceptionally interesting, thought-provoking blogs might now come to an end. What is to stop companies and public bodies from hunting down people who may have been negative about them. What blogger, with bills to pay and mouths to feed, is now going to take the chance of lifting the lid on mismanagement, badly though policies or idiotic governmental decrees when there is the very real chance that their identities can be revealed for nothing more than a lurid headline on someone's chip wrapper.

Why should bloggers put their careers at risk, over subjects that they are evangelical about, when the simpler, safer option is to fall back into the horde of people who grumble under their breath yet risk nothing to change things for the better. The world can then continue with less public scrutiny because people are scared to speak out.

If it is so important to know a bloggers name so as to better judge them as a source, then I think that it is time to do away with the journalistic practice of protecting sources. After all, without producing the source, the journalist could be (gasp) making up lies. I think we should also know, for definite, what enticements a journalist has had to write a piece for a paper - that 'holiday in France' piece, was it 'bought' by the holiday company that receives the good review?

(The answer is that this does go on - I've seen it with my own eyes)

I wonder if Judge Eady reads blogs, or even has any idea what a blog is. I wonder if he has any idea of what a door he has opened for witch hunts and the reduction of our knowledge of public services to bitesized PR fluff. I wonder if he realises that anonymity is one of the strengths of the internet, not a weakness.

And as for the Times - I wouldn't wipe my arse on it.

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I am exceptionally busy this week, with a 60 hour work week, two days of conference and numerous other things dotted around the place. I barely have time to sleep, let alone eat or write.

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Photograph by Robotson licensed under a CC license.