There is a slight problem I have with returning to the ambulances, and that is my new partner is currently on sick leave, and has been for some time.  No-one knows when they are going to come back to work – so I’m often finding myself ‘single’ with nobody to work with.

When you are ‘single’ you can be teamed up with another ‘single’ pretty much anywhere in London.

At the moment our sector is having trouble reaching our government targets (which are calculated at the end of February), of particular concern is Poplar ambulance station who, because of atrocious manning, are struggling to meet the targets.  To counter this management have made it known that any shortfall in manning Poplar must be corrected as a priority.

So – when I’m single I’m often going to find myself making my way over to the Poplar area.

Last night however, there was no-one for me to work with at Poplar…So they asked me to work on the FRU.

Fear of being asked to travel over to the other side of London is I refused meant that last night I was once more a solo responder.

So last night I had the hump.

Thankfully it wasn’t too busy, the usual complaints of “my child hasn’t eaten properly for two days”, “I’m having an angina attack” and “I’m drunk” were quite enough.  There was one interesting job though – A policeman hit a pedestrian with his car.

Thankfully he wasn’t travelling on blue lights, nor going too fast for the road.  The woman apparently ran out into the road without looking, which given some of the pedestrian activities I normally see isn’t out of the ordinary.  Luckily for the woman involved there was an anesthetist walking past, and he managed the immediate need to keep her neck still.  After our examination our main concerns was that she was concussed and that she was cold from lying in the road – thankfully the ambulance was pretty quick, and she was soon in the warm, where our further examination showed no immediate injuries.

The area was cordened off and as the woman was being looked after by the crew I went to make sure that the policeman who was driving was alright.  He was quite shaken up by the event, and I hope he gets support from his work.

In completely unrelated news, there is a lot of anger amongst us EMTs in London – as a lot of people are getting docked pay under our Agenda for Change pay-deal.  As soon I find out more, I’ll let you know – but it looks like some people are losing as much as £3,200 this year.  As it’s to do with money I don’t understand it myself, but I’ll get someone to explain it to me.