I've been kicking around the idea for this post for some time, it's all to do with (and I hope you'll forgive the cringe-worthy jargon) 'Citizen journalism'. The purpose of the post is to throw out the general ideas that I've been thinking about this, and more specifically, how I and this blog fits into this role. I'm not the only person thinking about this.

It was the raid on a house in Forest Gate that got me thinking about my role in bringing people news. For those that don't know, Forest Gate is a place within my 'patch'. Acting on anti-terrorist intelligence that would later turn out to be faulty, the police raided a residential house there. One man would be shot and wounded by the police. Some people considered this a blow against the Islamic faith.

The rights and wrongs of this raid have been discussed in other more learned places than here. My own point of view is simply this - how embarrassed would the police have been if the intelligence had turned out to be correct and there had indeed been a cyanide bomb attack that they could have stopped.

During the search of the house following the raid the police had an ambulance on standby a little way down the road, apparently it was a nice little bit of quiet overtime. When the ambulance service works this closely with the police there is a fair swap of gossip.

For about a week before the news was made public I knew that the police had found £32,000 in cash in the house. At least that is what one of the crews on scene had told me. The money was apparently kept in black bin bags.

So what was I supposed to do with this information? If I were the true 'citizen journalist' then I should surely publish this information. With the amount of national media that the story was getting if I did disclose this 'insider' information then I would be assured of getting a large leap in page-hits. If I published I would probably be the centre of attention for a while. All good publicity if one is trying to sell a book in the near future.

On the other hand - If I did publish it could wreck any potential legal case against the householders. It may well get an ambulance crew and a loose-lipped policeman into trouble. It was also an unconfirmed rumour and if it turned out to be false then my reputation would possibly take a hit and I could leave myself open for a libel case.

So what should I do? 'Publish and be damned', poorly protected by my 'amateur' status? Or should I keep the information to myself - supposedly betraying the whole reasoning behind citizen journalism?

I decided that it would be best all round if I kept the information to myself - the risks to myself, the police, the ambulance crew and to the householders themselves (who could have a completely reasonable explanation for the money) could not be balanced out by the benefits of a 'scoop', no matter how much this author craves attention.

So here is the thought that is rattling around in my head - is 'citizen journalism' just a way for disposable people to release damaging information? The BBC wouldn't want to publish something that was incorrect. Yet if Joe Smith's blog publishes it and he gets sued then it isn't the big media company that is damaged.

Quite possibly it is this specific lack of knowing the rights and wrongs of publishing that makes 'citizen journalism' both exciting and dangerous - and would anyone care if another blogger gets taken down?

Bloggers are already being sued, and I think that there will be more legal action in the future.

I have no idea about the ethics of journalism, which is perhaps why this blog doesn't touch too often on the news or on digging out a story. I'm not a journalist, I'm not trained to be a journalist and to be fair I don't think I'm smart enough to be a journalist. But if it were my desire to become a 'citizen journalist' there would be nothing stopping me from going out looking for stories and those stories could get me into a lot of legal trouble.

So - to all those bloggers who consider themselves 'citizen journalists', be careful it's not as simple as stringing sentences together on a website.


In saying this the much nicer phrase 'Participatory media' is much more fitting. Thought up by people much smarter than I, it describes how more citizens may assist the regular news outlets by providing pieces that can be checked and edited by professionals.

But does this damage the 'truth' of citizen media?

I don't know - which is why I'm putting these half-formed thoughts out here - please feel free to tell me I'm being an idiot.

In the ambulance service we often require the help of the police. Sometimes it's to protect us if we are heading into a dangerous situation, sometimes a job that we go to will require crimnal rather than medical aid. Often we will be sent to a victim of an assault before any polce are able to attend - they have the same problems with manning that we do.

Sometimes an accident scene is so volatile that we need the police to manage it for us while we concentrate on the injured person. If we are dealing with a seriously injured person then the last thing that we ned to be concentrating on is a big crowd of people.

The Law Is A Donkey has a sad post that highlights the role the police have to play in these situations.

If you haven't come across this blog before it's written by a police officer in Camden, not too far from where I work. It's on my bloglines subscription as the author writes an excellent tale.

I've got to admit that we don't often 'worry' about the police, we expect that they are as prepared for the horrible sights that assail you as us ambulance people. Sometimes it's easy to forget that they have very little medical experience and that the things that we see as being a minor injury can look rather scary.

So from now on I'll try to be a bit more mindful about what the police get to see.

There is a little old lady.  She sits alone in her house.  Mainly she stays in one room – there is no radio, there is no television.

She sits at her table and shuffles paper.

She has a mild form of dementia.

Some carers arrive, they give her some medication.  They change her incontinence pad, they get her dressed and washed.

Meals on wheels arrive, she has something to eat.

In the evening there are more carers, they change her incontinence pads and give her some night medication.  They put her to bed.

She lives, isolated in her house.

Her carers don’t like her because she shouts and she repeats herself.

 

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One day she falls over.  She is found by her carers.

So the ambulance service is called.  We pick her up, but she doesn’t want to go to hospital.

We watch the carers bully her so that they can change her soiled incontinence pad.  The carers are aggressive.  Their tone of voice and the words that they use are harsh.

Our patient tells us that the carers that visit in the morning have hit her.  Given the attitude and actions of the carers that I have seen this doesn’t surprise me.

We contact her daughter – this isn’t the first time that she has made this claim, her daughter has reported it to the social services.

We leave the patient, we cannot kidnap her.  We return to station where we fill out a ‘vulnerable adult form’ – this goes off to our Control where it is dealt with by a specialist team.

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A week later I’m asked to phone the social services person dealing with the case.

They ask me what I’ve seen, what I’ve heard.

Explaining over the phone it feels that trying to express the atmosphere in the house is impossible.

But for once I have faith in the social worker, I don’t know why but I do.

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I don’t know yet how this story ends.

The little old lady needs people to not hit her, she needs company, she needs care.

Maybe our attendance will be the tipping point that will start that care.  Maybe the social services needed to hear from someone else the reports of abuse?  Maybe the carers tip-toe around the daughter when she is there, maybe something will get done.

I hope so.

 

 

 

Right – that’s it, I’m out of ambulance stories and I have a week off work.  I’m going to try and post every day – but I just don’t know what about.  Regular service will soon be resumed. You have been warned.

This brings me joy.

Thanks Suw

…And I’ve just spent a very pleasant time speaking with a nice man from BBC Radio – more when I know more.

I never knew it, but it seems that us local ambulance crews have been having a holiday!

Two of our regular attenders (both alcoholics) had disappeared, while one had been in prison.  Oh, the glory of never having to go to the familiar call of ‘female fitting’ on Green Street, or the ‘Man collapsed’ at Woodgrange road.

Unfortunately it seems that with the nice weather the usual suspects have returned.

Three in particular have been particularly unwanted.  One, who is possibly the most disgusting smelling man alive has reappeared from who knows where.  He’ll have an ambulance called for him because he (a) Drinks too much and falls asleep in the street, and (b) Looks half dead – well…he smells half dead.  He was picked up eight times in one day.  I saw him as he was dropped off at hospital by the ambulance, then five minutes later he was staggering off looking for the nearest off-license.

We are a bit stuffed to be honest – people call us and we have to go to them, we have to take them to hospital because there is no other place we can take them and there is no chance of them being ‘cured’.  We just have to wait until they drop dead.  Then they are replaced by younger ‘up and coming’ alcoholics.

Our second caller is less smelly, although with the recent death of his landlord I don’t think that’ll last too long.  He has possibly the worlds most broken nose and phones us up to let us know that a man has collapsed.  If you aren’t quick getting there then he’ll sometimes wander off and you never find him – instead you waste spend twenty minutes trawling the streets.  I was sent to him the other night – I saw him standing in the public phonebox still talking to Control, so we sidled up to him.  He never noticed us.

“Control”, I called up on the radio, “Is our ‘collapsed’ patient still on the phone?”

“Roger that”.

“Well, he’s the most upright collapse I’ve been to in some time…”

I don’t mind this one too much as he walks onto the back of the ambulance, sits fairly quietly while we have a chat, and then walks off the back of the ambulance at the hospital.

The final of the regulars I’m going to write about today (for have no doubt, there are many more) vanished for nearly a year.  She also is particularly smelly, occasionally abusive and will call us four or five times a day.  She had been living with some nuns, but the nuns got fed up with her and threw her back out on the streets.

So there you go – too annoying for nuns…

 

It’s sad to have people in this state, there is nothing anyone can do to help them and their lives are disappearing down the neck of a bottle of cheap cider.  Sometimes I think that their whole social circle revolves around drinking, riding in ambulances and sitting in hospital waiting rooms.  It also drives you crazy when you are just about to have your first cup of tea of the shift and you get sent out to them.  Once or twice I’ve had to bite my tongue as I sit in the back with them while Control is desperately radioing for a free ambulance to go to a sick child.

But what can you do?

UPDATE: For those who don't read the comments, Luis Enrique has pointed me in the direction of an exceedingly interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell about an innovative way to solve the problem that my post talks about. From my view on the shop floor he has got me convinced.

As the subject line says – it’s so that when I get sprayed in the face with someone else’s blood it goes onto the glasses rather than into my lovely, virus absorbing, eyes.

Apologies for the poor quality of the photo, it’s taken at night with my pda/phone internal camera – if you can’t see it properly…well, I got sprayed with blood.

It was the last job of the shift, pretty much down the road from the hospital – it was given to my crewmate and I as, “Throat cut.  Serious bleeding”.  Now, I’ve been at this game long enough to realise that a cut throat can be anything from a near beheading to a shaving cut.

As an aside, my mate got sent to a ‘stabbing’, it turned out that the landlord of our ‘victim’ had poked him in the chest with a finger…

So we rushed down there, fully prepared to see a man with a slight scratch to his neck, probably from an irate girlfriend.

As we got there, the first few things that I saw made me think that this was a ‘proper’ job.

• There was someone laying on the floor in the street with a dark puddle of liquid around him.
• There were two policemen leaning over our patient.
• The police were looking worried.
• There was already police ‘incident’ tape strung around the area.

I leapt out the cab of the ambulance, grabbed my response bag and jogged over to the patient while my crewmate parked the ambulance and started getting the stretcher out the back.

...I felt the familiar feeling of someone else’s blood being splattered across my face.

Our patient was an eighteen year old black man, he was covered in blood although thankfully he was screaming.  Screaming is good, it means that you are alive.

The police had saved his life – one of them had bunched up the patient’s t-shirt and was pressing it against the wound.  When I removed the t-shirt to look at the wound I found a small cut under the jaw, but one that had severed an artery (quite possibly the one marked Mylo-hyoid in this diagram).  The wound was still spurting blood at high force which caught us all a little by surprise.

Through this cut of perhaps one inch, the patient had lost about a litre of blood.  Without the quick thinking of the police, he would have bled to death on the scene.  As it was the patient was entering the second stage of shock brought on by lack of blood.  This was serious.

I jammed a couple of dressings on the wound, and knowing that just tying them wouldn’t work I spent the rest of the job applying pressure with both hands while trying to reassure the patient.  It was here that the patient gave a cough and I felt the familiar feeling of someone else’s blood being splattered across my face.  Given the proximity to the hospital we ‘scooped and ran’, putting the patient into the ambulance and blue-lighting it into Newham hospital.

One of the policemen travelled with us.  The patient was, quite understandably,  frightened by his predicament and asked for someone to hold his hand.  As I was clutching the dressings to his face I didn’t have a spare hand – yet the policeman, also covered with the patient’s blood, didn’t hesitate to hold the frightened patient’s hand.

Screaming is good, it means that you are alive.

When we got to the hospital the patient asked if we were all white.  I have no idea what was going through his head to ask that question, perhaps he had been brainwashed to believe that all us white people in uniform don’t give a damn about young black men.  To be honest I hadn’t given it a thought and I doubt that the policeman had either, all we saw was someone who needed our help.

It’s what drives me nuts about the media, and to a certain extent members of the public and ’community leaders’.  Everyone is so quick to jump onto the bandwagon of criticising the police over, for example, a raid where they believed they had good information about a chemical bomb – yet you never seem to hear about the numerous small acts of kindness that they perform daily.

I guess that this is what blogs are good for.

We got the patient to the hospital where he was seen by the trauma team.  The surgeons got a bit splattered by blood themselves, unlike me however they had plastic aprons on.

So then it was a simple case of washing my face and arms, mopping out the back of the ambulance and going home to sleep…

…only to be kept awake by drunken football fans.

 

And yes – I am playing with drop-quotes on this post.  Let me know what you think, does it make me look like a cheap magazine?

It appears that the entire Ghana nation is using my street as a parking lot After being annoyed by drunks all night and after a bugger of a last job (more on which later), the last thing that I need are more drunks keeping me awake as chatter outside my window.

It's bad enough I've had to park a couple of minutes walk away.

I've done my work, do I really have to put up with it at home as well?

A lot of people outside my bedroom window need to be very thankful right now that the UK doesn't let us own guns...

Great, now they are sounding their horns at each other.

Oh even better...R&B...

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Sent from a mobile phone, from his bed, with gritted teeth.
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