Tom you are causing me sleepless nights, your profile is bloody horrendous! I'm surprised you have not been directed to Occupational Health for an interview with a shrink. Its 0300hrs but I don’t mind, on the road I was always up for it, until about 4-5, then it became a right slog. To matters in hand or even better, the hand of god! The Community Hand book is as you say trying to teach emergency ambulance personnel how to suck eggs. In that case it must have been written for the benefit you describe, or as an AS training manual for basic training. Many years ago a leading academic commenting on the Services proposal to encourage the recruitment of more academically orientated people, to fulfil the requirement for additional paramedics, stated that he believed that this was a mistake. What was required of an emergency ambulance person was a large supply of common sense and experience. Of course no one took any notice of the common sense approach to the work. The majority of people who live and work in London and particularly East London are not racists! Any one, who has passed through the local schooling systems, has been taught about other pupils cultures. Children celebrate all the main cultural festival such as Christmas, Divali and Ramadan also Guru Narks' Birthday. Students do cultural studies as part of the curriculum. Who needs this hand book? Oh yes Maybe the training school clique who are currently in all the top uniformed jobs within the LAS (they think they are running the show ----ha,ha,ha! That lot were the first to escape off the front line when London really became multi-ethnic back in the eighties. Before that people were called English, niggers or pakis and that was on their own ambulance stations. In those days a common comment at Newham was,” Yeah make the tea, it’s only a packi with a belly ache!” Your comment about having some semblance of common sense and being polite and respectful is a very clear interpretation of LAS protocols which used to be designed to be guidelines, which if disregarded would require justification but only if there was an official complaint. You go on to say, if in doubt ask! Although the booklet may say that one should speak to the head, of say a Bangladeshi family it’s the patient that you really need to speak to. As you know one listens to a history of the event as described by the most competent English speaker (unless you are one of the tiny number of multi-Asian language speakers in the LAS). You then ask the patient to describe their symptoms. If the patient dose not answer or looks towards her family then the next logical question must be, dose the patient (name) speak English? Yes! Well no actually. About this time last year one of my ex-colleagues attended a family in the east-end and on attempting to communicate with the patient was met with sullen silence. The medic turned to the family and asked, Dose the patient speak English? This patient was later taken to the London Hospital by another ambulance after the family followed the practical advice offered by the first crew to respond. (Refused to travel) Three weeks later, on Christmas Eve to be precise, a letter was dispatched by the Independent Complaints Advocacy Service, which I have been led to believe is an arm of the Mare Street Citizens Advice Bureau. They had been authorised to write on behalf of the patient’s father and misused this authority to ensure that no member of the Services Complaints Investigation Team, ( a right bunch of wankers at the best of times.) was ever permitted to interview the family. Although there were serious structural problems in the way the Service had dealt with the whole incident, (all unknown to the CAB) that is in the Control/ Incident Reporter Interface, the whole direction of the complaint was directed in one single trajectory. The cascading shit syndrome was in full flow, and right onto the heads of the first crew to respond. A complete fiction was developed by the NE, ICAS and this piece of creative writing caused the two crew members to be awarded a final written warning and a written warning as punishment for bringing the Service into disrepute. In order to make sure this happened, the head of the LAS Public Safety Committee Mr Robespierre Selby decided to have a little fixing meeting, to which he invited various members of the prosecution team. The consensus was that the Crew were guilty, and this decision completely ignored the fact that what really upset the family was the attitude and behaviour and error of at least one of the Control “Call Takers”. When the family called the Service the second time and as per the advice given to them earlier, the control assistant systematically abused the patients Sister and put her through the wringer. The Sister was so shocked by the verbal bullying she was receiving , that she disconnected the telephone. From reading the transcript of this call I believe that this ghoul, this spectre of the Ivory Tower Control Room put the Sister through a double and some-times triple interrogation to access the necessary information. According to Mr Clinton Beale, the LAS Quality Assurance Advisor , the Emergency Medical Dispatcher had breached AMPDS protocols and told her that the service was to busy and she should phone her doctor. If only that had been all that he/she had done! If he or she had previously dealt with calls from this address, it would make the offence painful in the extreme and the subject of a disciplinary enquiry which if found guilty, should have resulted in dismissal . So what happened to the EMD? As far as I am aware nothing! He/she caused the delay in the transportation of a possibly seriously ill patient to hospital, at best treated the family as if they were pests and possibly with deep rooted racist overtones. All these documents were made available through the offices of Josef Kane (Crappy) Investigating Officer, Professional Standards Unit. The third Blind Mouse was of course, the head guillotiner, Mr Selby late of the Metropolitan Police. I knew he was a senior control officer, but I didn’t know he was previously in the Traffic Division or was it dogs or more likely horses. Mr Selby is definitely the type of man to ends up with his head stuck up a horse’s arse, which I think he certainly did in this case. That’s three officers involved in this case are a bit word blind! I myself am a bit dyslexic, but these three gentlemen, scrub that, pounces are way out of my league, definitely Ferengi. Not only did they ignore the truth during the investigation phases, the crew was suspended and when they eventually were invited to a disciplinary hearing guess who turned out to be the Chairman, Mr Selby. Naughty, naughty! Now this is a perfect example of why such things should never happen. The Chairman of a disciplinary panel is supposed to be impartial, he is not supposed to get involved in the investigatory process, let alone decide that the accused are guilty prior to hearing both sides of the case. But then there never was a case in the first place! The condemned crew behaved correctly, as ambulance personnel we have no right to take anyone anywhere without their permition or consent. This consent can be real or implied i.e. the unconscious or imposed by statute, a prisoner or those detained under the appropriate Mental Health Act. When the patient supposedly changed her mind the family followed professional advice and once again calling the Service. Unfortunately their call to Control was picked up by a possible racist, EMD. The EMD responsible, was of course a ghost! An ethereal voice at the other end of the telephone! The EMD caused the patients family to become so angry that they took their complaint to the, NE ICAS. Once they got there and told their rather confused tale the good people at the CAB helped them straighten things out, or did they? I spent years In the Royal Military Police as an investigator and I know that the further one gets from an event the less clear becomes the memory of it. When gaps or inconsistencies develop in the memory people have a tendency to be creative and fill-in and that is when the tale or complaint becomes a fiction. So what was it that set the crew up for this trial? On the initial call, when they couldn’t get any verbal response from the patient they innocently asked, “ Dose she speak English?” or “Cant she speak English?” Standard question of a verbally, non responsive Asian patient! To assume that because her Sister spoke the Queens English or some variety of it, is no guarantee that the patient dose or even that the patient is a blood relative. In different cultures Sister can mean different things. That is Cultural Awareness through empirical experience, in other words common sense! A few years ago I found it necessary to write to the chief Executive Officer asking him to remind some of his officers of their responsibilities under the Officer Code of Conduct, this was concerning a previous manager of Newham Complex. He had misappropriated (stolen) about £1000 of amenity’s money and wouldn’t give it back when asked to do so. Senior Officers all the way up from the Divisional Officer Mr Steve Sale and up to and including Mr Flaherty, (the chief Executive Officer must have also been aware of this) attempted to bully one of my colleagues into dropping the matter. After I stuck my oar in they had a slight change of attitude and the station manager concerned, a Mr Wicks was allowed to quietly resign and slip away from both disciplinary action and a criminal record. He also managed to hold on to his pension rights and even got a good work reference from some-one, because he was quickly taken into employment by the Docklands Light Railway as a junior manager. It’s amazing how well these people take care of their own! I sometimes wonder if they are not all members of a certain secret society, of the short legged trouser variety! I think it’s all the fault of Mrs Wendy Foers, the Director of Human Recourses. Ever since she arrived at the LAS, as Don Page’s gopher and Central Divisional Executive Officer, she has had a view of operational staff which is generally erroneous. People don’t join the LAS or any other ambulance service because they want to abuse or be cruel to sick and injured patients,( at least not the operational staff. The Officers and the Human Recourses department now I could tell you a few good stories about what they have got up to ? Another day perhaps!