From the BBC, (via BWTS)

Students 'dialled 999 for taxi'

A group of students put lives at risk by dialling 999 for an ambulance to take them home after a night drinking.

Kent Ambulance NHS Trust said its crew was "stunned" after the call to an "unwell" woman who was actually drunk, in Canterbury, early on Thursday.

When the crew arrived they found a man and two women. One of them was drunk.

An ambulance spokesman said the students had tried calling a taxi but had no reply, so had contacted the emergency services.

Paramedic team leader Dave Latham said: "The crew told them that they were not a taxi service and that by attending to them they were potentially being taken away from dealing with someone whose life may have been at risk”.

"The young man then became abusive and said that he didn't care and that it was his right as a tax payer."

The ambulance trust said the crew carried out a medical assessment of the patient and found that she was drunk but otherwise fit and well.

Mr Latham said it was the second time that a Canterbury crew had been called out unnecessarily by students in the town.

A crew was called out on Monday night to the Venue nightclub at the University of Kent where a young man was said to be unwell.

'Think twice'

The ambulance crew tried to establish what was wrong, but he refused to tell them saying that it was his right to be taken to hospital as a tax payer, the trust said.

Mr Latham said: "It is a shame because the vast majority of students are okay, but there is a small minority of people who are giving students a bad name.

"Lives could have been put at risk here.

"We are not a taxi service. We are an emergency service and here to help those who need to be taken to hospital and not to someone's front door.

"We urge students in the town to think about this in the future."

The trust said it had contacted both universities in the town and asked that students are reminded not to dial 999 unnecessarily.

Once more…is this really news?  Some nights half my jobs are like this…

I arrived on station this morning to hear the news on the television that there had been fifty stabbings over the Bank holiday weekend*.

"Hmm", I thought, "A few more than normal, but hardly news".

Then I realised that they were talking about the whole country and not just London.

So now I was surprised at how just how low** the number of stabbings was

I don't know if it's just East London having a higher number of stabbings than the rest of London, thereby causing me to overestimate the number of stabbings we have but I wouldn't be surprised if there were nearly fifty stabbings every weekend in London alone.

---

I went to a stabbing yesterday - while we'd normally wait for the police to arrive to escort us into the house, the way that the job was sent down to us over the computer terminal let me think that I could safely approach.

The doorbell was answered by a young man with an obvious wound to the upper arm.

Getting him onto the ambulance I learned that he had 'come clean' to his long-term girlfriend about cheating on her two years ago. During the course of the argument she had then stabbed him in the arm with a kitchen knife.

Thankfully the wound, while deep, wasn't especially serious - for the ambulance side of things it is a simple job to dress the wound and take the patient to hospital. The doctors at the hospital would have to be more cautious, as the nature of the wound meant that the bone, or the layer of tissue covering the bone may have been damaged, in which case infection is a bigger worry than normal.

The police arrived and got the whole story - the first words out of my patient's mouth were, "I don't want her charged". So the case will be referred to the domestic violence team but it probably won't go any further.


On the way to hospital I let the patient know how lucky he was - I've been involved in a couple of jobs where a domestic argument has turned into murder when the man has been stabbed by his girlfriend/wife. One was on Christmas eve.

My advice to everyone is that you shouldn't have an argument in the kitchen...


At the hospital the patient's girlfriend arrived with tears in her eyes. As soon as the nurse had finished assessing the wound the couple pulled the curtain across the trolley bay and hugged each other for a long time.

---

It's strange, but I know that I'd feel different about the situation if it had been the woman who had been stabbed. If he had stabbed her, then I would be thinking of how the woman was a victim - with a male being stabbed I'm more thinking about how daft he was in causing the argument in the first place.

With a male being stabbed by a woman, it is kind of expected that he will just 'get over it', while if a woman was stabbed by a man I would start imagining that this would be a possible start of a longer term abuse.

I'm vaguely comforted by the thought that if this was more a case of prolonged abuse I'm be just as sympathetic for the victim whatever their sex.

It's strange to examine your thoughts and see such a hidden prejudice - I guess that somewhere, while being brought up to act as a 'gentleman', I was programmed to see women as needing protection.

And to think I always considered myself a feminist.

*Due I think because of a number of high profile knife murders and the current police knife amnesty
**Obviously it would be really good if there were no stabbings at all...

If there is one thing that I think this blog has done, it is to let people know that sometimes people who dial ‘999’ don’t need a blue light emergency ambulance.  As a service we recognise this and so have created job roles for people to do this ‘intermediate’ work.

We also use volunteer ambulance services to prop up assist us in the day to day running of the LAS.

Have a look at this video file (.wmv only – sorry).

It’s a newspiece that has someone complaining that they phoned 999 for an sick relative and were shocked when a St John ambulance turned up.

The man in the report complaining is ex-ambulance service themselves – lets just say that there is a lot of bad blood between some of the LAS road staff and the St John ambulance service.

It dates back to the ambulance dispute of 1989–1990.

So, once more I invite you to look at how the media portrays the ambulance service, in this case it seems a little more balanced.

 

Of course – they could have always asked me…

I'd give his friend 11 out of 10 for sheer guts – he did something I wouldn’t have done in a million years.

They'd left him sitting on the sofa enjoying the afternoon sun - last night had been a heavy drinking session and he was a bit sleepy. He was fine half an hour ago, but when they next saw him he was covered in bloody vomit and he wasn't breathing.

I was working solo on the FRU car when I got the call as 'bad hangover - sleepy - not breathing'.  As I didn't know any better I was thinking about what I would say to them when I arrived to find the patient breathing, something about ambulances not being needed for hangovers…  Still - no matter, as always I drove there as quickly and safely as possible.

His friends opened the front door for me and I walked into the house - one of them, in a thick Eastern European accent, asked me to follow him.  He led me out to the garden, lying on the patio in front of me was the patient.  He wasn't breathing, he was covered in bloody vomit and he was a nasty shade of mottled purple. One friend was doing good chest compressions while on the phone to our Control.

Another friend was giving him mouth-to-mouth...

…through the bloody vomit covering the patient’s nose and mouth.

I’ve got to say that this impressed me a huge amount.  It also made me feel a little ill.

To be honest - if his friends hadn't been doing CPR I probably would have recognised death right there at the scene - as it is, if someone starts CPR then we have to continue all the way to the hospital.  I started doing my job - breathing for the patient using my ambu-bag and pounding on his chest to keep blood flowing to the essential organs.

Every time I pressed on his chest a little geyser of bloody vomit erupted from his mouth. With an airway in the patient’s mouth, that gush of fluid can travel a long way.  The floor around the patient was also covered in his vomit, so I couldn't kneel down.  I ended up doing the chest compressions standing with my feet five foot apart while bending over the patient.

My back started to twinge.

 

The ambulance took ten minutes to get there.  To be fair, they did have a long way to travel, and there were some heavy roadworks between them and myself.  We scooped him up into the ambulance and drove quickly to the hospital while I continued to do chest compressions and the ambulance attendant kept breathing for him.

 

As suspected there was nothing that we or the hospital could do – another man in his mid-forties dead.

 

I had to go back to the house to pick up the FRU car.  The patient’s friends came out to meet me, only a few of them spoke English, so I had to explain that the patient had died.  As NeeNaw mentions, the ambulance service doesn’t like to use the word ‘dead’.  Unfortunately it was the word I had to use.  I let them know that they had done everything correctly – but that the patient didn’t have much chance of surviving despite his friends best efforts.

I left them trying to phone the patient’s mother so that they, in their native tongue, could explain what happened.

Dear ‘Opiate Addict’,

     Just a quick letter to give you a warning – especially if you are in the East London area (although I do not know how far the distribution of drugs stretches).

     It appears that there is a batch of illegal opiates on the streets of East London, what is unusual about this particular batch is that I believe it to be cut with a little less chalk/rat poison/talc powder than usual.  I can tell you this because my friends and I have come across a number of regular users of these substances who have overdosed.

     Signs of an overdose include a reduced desire to breathe, purplish lips and ending up being buried in a cemetery in a wooden box called a coffin.

     As a suggestion – if you desire to inject/smoke opiate based drugs, try a little less than you normally use, and make sure that there is someone ‘straight’ to watch over you.  If your rate of breathing drops below ten breaths a minute they should call for an ambulance.  Tell the caller not to worry, the ambulance service and the hospitals don’t involve the police.  If they wish, just ask them to leave the door open before they run away.  A note pinned to your chest may also be useful.

     Try not to vomit.  It just makes a mess.

     I would also ask that when we revive you, try not to attack the ambulance crew for ‘ruining the buzz’ – trust me, we only do this if we think that you are about to die – at least you know that the rest of the batch you have may last you a little longer than expected.

     Keep safe out there!

 

          Yours,

               A friendly ambulance person.

Blogging may be a bit light over the next few days - The proofs of "Da Book" are in, so I have to carefully check them. As I'm working 12 hour shifts, and it has to be done by Thursday, I've got to concentrate n that rather than my blog.

The post before last, concerning the boy with the broken toe - I thought I'd leave it up to you, dear commenter, to decide why I posted it. The main reason was to highlight the attitude that the media often show towards us, and the way that the LAS can only respond with a 'no comment', or 'an investigation is taking place', something I've touched on in previous posts.

The first patient of our shift this morning was a classic example of how patients can often forget a potentially useful part of their medical history. The patient was an elderly man with a general sort of abdominal ache. We quizzed him about his history (nothing especially relevant apart from some possibly constipating drugs), our initial idea was that the patient had constipation.

It was only as we were wheeling him out of his front door that he mentioned that he had diverticulitis - a medical condition that can cause exactly the type of pain he was describing...

At least he mentioned it to us rather than waiting and telling the nurses, making us look like fools, something that happens with some regularity (they'll then go on to tell the doctors something additional, thereby making the nurses look bad).

Right - time tp start the proofreading...

-=-=-=-=-
Sent from a mobile phone, probably from the cab of an ambulance.
-=-=-=-=-

To answer a comment…

Yes I will be doing my traditional ‘sit around my mum’s place to watch and laugh at the Eurovision song contest’ – It’ll be a bit different for me this year as I won’t have access to alcohol in order to numb the pain.

I shall also be at a Eurovision party in Second Life.  I may be wearing something UK based…

…

A Schoolgirl uniform in honour of our entry?

 No ambulance for agony boy

A boy was left crying in agony at his New Addington home after waiting in vain for more than an hour for an ambulance to arrive. Scott Thorpe broke his toe when a concrete bollard collapsed on his foot - but when his dad called 999 for help the response was painfully slow.

In the end parents Anthony Bailey and Maureen Thorpe, both 50, were forced to beg a neighbour to come to the rescue and drive the 10-year-old to hospital.

Furious Anthony has complained to the London Ambulance Service (LAS) about the poor response - but has been told paramedics had to give priority to more serious calls.

The dad-of-two said: "I think it's disgusting. For a boy that age to be distressed and in pain like he was is disgusting.

"I waited and waited. I waited an hour and ten minutes and nothing arrived. He was crying and shouting out, rolling around in the chair saying: 'Help me dad'."

The youngster was hurting so much, that when his dad finally did manage to get him to hospital he was plied with morphine to ease the pain.

Anthony said: "The toe was swollen up and had gone blue. The person on the phone said it was the wrong time of day to have an accident.

"They asked: 'Can you get a cab?' I said: 'No I can't afford it'. I couldn't do anything."

With neither of Scott's parents able to drive and no neighbours initially on hand to help he was left stranded.

And the family insist they are too cash strapped, with Anthony being on sickness benefit, to pay the expensive fare to Mayday Hospital.

The accident happened at about 5.30pm on May 2 near tower blocks at the top of Lodge Lane where Scott and his friends were playing.

His dad persuaded a neighbour to drive him to the minor injuries unit at Parkway Medical Centre.

There Anthony was told the injury was so serious his son needed to go to hospital.

But once home the neighbour who had helped could not take them because she had to look after her own children. So Anthony called an ambulance at 5.50pm - and more than an hour later they were still waiting for help at their home in North Downs Crescent.

Eventually, another neighbour came home from work and took the Wolsey Juniors pupil to hospital.

But his dad is fuming at the response.

A spokesman for the LAS confirmed an ambulance would have reached Scott, but that there were other people in more urgent need of help.

He said: "Our records show that we were unable to send an ambulance immediately because all of the crews in the area were already responding to other 999 calls.

"Having established that the injury was definitely not life threatening, one of our clinical advisers contacted the family and suggested that the boy could be given painkillers before the ambulance arrived.

"However, we were subsequently advised that they would make their own way to hospital.

"His family have been in touch with us and we will be providing them with a full response in due course."

 Please feel free to discuss the difference between an ambulance going to someone with a heart attack, and someone with a broken toe.  Consider the limited resources that prevent an ambulance on every street corner.  You may be amazed to hear that our Priority dispatch system does sometimes work…

 

(Cheers BWTS and ParamedicUK)

It seems that this week is turning into a bit of a ‘confession’ about how I sometimes deal with patients.

I was sent to a twelve year old whose hand had been burnt.  The address that we were given was in the street, so we could expect anything.

Outside the local newsagents was a group of ‘feral children’ eight or nine of them aged 10–13 I’d say – I told my crewmate who was driving that we would ‘scoop and run’, as it was near the end of our shift and there was no way that I wanted to try and control a bunch of little thugs.

“Who’s the patient”, I asked as I jumped out the ambulance – I’d already spotted one lad holding his thumb, sure enough he identified himself as the patient.

“Ok then, on the ambulance”, I opened the door and bundled him in.

About six of the other children all wanted to come with him – I wasn’t going to hang about to argue so, after discovering that there was no relative or adult present, we made our way to the hospital.

The child had decided to spray some deodorant into a glass jar, then drop a match in it.  As the fumes caught light his hand had received a minor, but painful searing.  The skin wasn’t even red.

Still – we have a nice burns dressing that smells lovely and can ease the pain so I wrapped his hand in one and asked him why he had done such a daft thing.

“Dunno”, was this particular scientists answer.

I told him, in no uncertain terms that playing silly buggers with chemicals and fire would only lead to him getting even more hurt – would it do any good?  Well I doubt it, but surely it’s worth a try.

Here comes the confession – I was a little ‘short’ with him.  Not only do I think that a “there, there, everything will be alright” approach would have been wasted on him, but I also wanted to make sure that he knew exactly what an idiot he’d been.  I wanted to embarrass him, I wanted him to pay attention and most of all I didn’t want him doing similar things in the future.  There may have been some sarcasm, hopefully he’ll remember that more than if I’d been all motherly towards him.

My brother is a teacher – he uses sarcasm when needed to control his classes, he can be nice and he can be a right evil sod, it all depends on the child and on the situation.  So on that day I took a leaf out of his book.

I just hope that I don’t end up returning to that child after he’s torched his parents house.