It seems after some fiddling about, inspired by Hulver, that commenting is back up.  Can someone please leave a comment on this post to see if it *is* actually working and isn’t just on my system?

If it is working, then is seems that one of the little javascript widgets on my sidebar wasn’t behaving properly…

London (soon to be the rest of England) is under a bit of a heatwave at the moment, temperatures of 30C have lead to all sorts of announcments. The Met Office have raised the Heat-Health level to 3.  The next level up is a National Emergency

The advice given is as follows –

Stay out of the sun. Keep your home as cool as possible — shutting windows during the day may help. Open them when it is cooler at night. Keep drinking fluids. If there is anyone you know who might be at special risk, for example an older person living on their own, make sure they know what to do.

When they suggest drinking plenty of fluids I don’t suppose that they mean beer.  So please stop stripping your top off, drinking nothing but pints of Stella and then thinking it's amusing to run out laughing in front of ambulances travelling on blue lights. It's not big, it's not clever and one day my eyes will be elsewhere and it'll be all I can do to wave at you as you bounce off my windscreen...

I’ve also seen news that over the past few days the number of calls described as ‘Collapse’ are up 48%, while calls to asthmatics are up by 13%*

Calls are up all over London – while we’ve gotten used to dealing with 3,800 calls a day, our rate is now around 4,800.  With no extra ambulances you can imagine how busy we are.  Remind me to tell you how we are expected to work without a break sometime.

In my opinion it’s the major failing of the ambulance service – we keep seeing these rise in call rates, yet I’ve never heard of there being more ambulances put on the road.  We need more ambulances and we need them now – unfortunately that isn’t the way our policy makers see things, something that I’ll be posting about in a short while.

*Actual numbers may be slightly inaccurate as I’m remembering them from our work intranet, which I’ve forgottten this months password to.