Hugely off-topic for an ambulance blog, but I think that it can do with publicity outside of the usual suspects…

It’s a McDonalds employee who runs computer scenario so that franchise managers can work out how to get more profit.  When they added a realistic climate model the simulations started to end after running for 15–150 years.

They started to end because of societal collapse due to huge climate change.

His suggestions to fix the problem are great, but I’d be surprised to see them happen.

 

If half of what he says is true, and the simulation is correct – then it’s rather scary reading.

 

Found Via Wonderland

I have been a bad blogger for longer than I can remember.

Some time ago I took down my blogroll in order to give it a clean through, maybe add some Javascript to make it do wooshy things, and then put it back up.

Unfortunately, but if you know me personally, perhaps inevitably, I forgot to put my blogroll back up.  This means that with the exception of linking to blogs within specific posts, I’ve not been linking to other blogs.

Part of the whole reason why blogging is such a breath of fresh air is that it fosters a community.  Without links each blog is an island.  When I gave my talk about using your blog as a measure of your identity I neglected to mention that the blogs that you read/link to are part of that assessment that a reader makes of you.  As an example – if I were to link to the BNP, Combat18 or other far right/racist sites you’d have a different view of me than if I were to link to www.cuteoverload.com.

Kent Newsome writes extremely well on linking within blogging, talking about people who really should know better who have decided to stop linking.  These people want to ‘wall off’ their section of the ‘blogosphere’* in order to protect their power.

So the Blogroll is back up – I’m going to try and limit it to twenty entries (otherwise I think it just gets unwieldy) – it’s a subsection of my Bloglines subscriptions.

 

Now – despite my head feeling like it is going to explode and some rather worrying sudden deafness, I’m going to take a look at the report on the July 7th bombings.

 

*shudder…

Bit of stream of consciousness I’m afraid.

I wake up this morning at 5:30 – have a bath, and pack for a couple of days in Liverpool.  I take my stuff outside to put in the car.

“Why does my car door look open?”, I think to myself.

The answer, quite simply, is because some arsehole has used a crowbar to open my car door.  Then they have wrecked the ignition wiring in an attempt to hotwire it.

So now, instead of having a few days of rest and relaxation, I’m going to be running around getting my car fixed before it starts to rain and I end up with puddles under the driver’s seat.

I expected this sort of thing when I lived in a huge block of flats – my car got stolen five or six times – but this is a quite little turning in a not bad part of town.  Yet the little f**kers still target my elderly 1.0l Ford Fiesta.

No doubt they wanted to have a fun little ‘joyride’, they like the small engined cars because they go for longer on a tank of petrol.  But because of them my next few days are ruined, I’m going to have to cough up money that I really can’t afford to spend and I’m going to have a constant headache from grinding my teeth for at least 24 hours.

I’m lucky, I suppose, in that the thieves were obviously too incompetent to actually hotwire my car, otherwise I’d now be waiting for a call from the police to explain that they found the car burned out on some wasteground.  I suppose that the wiring is so non-standard (from previous theft attempts), and this is why it wasn’t taken – because they definitely tried.  I’m also lucky that they didn’t steal my spare work shirt on the back seat.

One day the Gods will smile on me and I’ll catch them red-handed.  Then they’ll know what an intimate knowledge of anatomy can do in the wrong hands.

Right – time to report it to the police…

 

I’m going to spend the next couple of days with a friend in Liverpool – so blogging may be a bit lighter than normal.  But I may put some pictures up in flickr.

After all, anything outside the M25 is a foreign country to my mind…

When I come back I’m going to fix the obvious thing on this blog that marks me as a bad blogger…

We have had our noticeboards on station cleared – we are to use a new method for receiving information from the strata of management above us.

So our notices now go in a folder which is updated every week, while the noticeboards are to be used for specific information.

Someone has come around our station and put up these nice new signs…

We had a manager who was well known for two things – laminating things and poor spelling.  They have since moved on to pastures new, but i think they may have left the ‘Health & Saefty’ sign for us to remember him by…

 

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…