A post to redress the balance, since all I seem to post about here are horrible deaths and moronic callers…
Two “bobbies on the beat” (policemen on foot, to those not familiar with the term) were perusing their local area when they saw a black taxi pulled over on the side of the road, with the driver slumped over the wheel. They sprinted over, prized open the taxi door and saw that the driver was not breathing.
One policeman dialled 999 directly on his mobile phone. Usually the police radio their control room if they need an ambulance, but going directly can save a few vital seconds. The other policeman pulled the patient from the taxi and placed him flat on his back at the side of the road. Having established that the patient was definitely not breathing, he had already begun CPR by the time his colleague had given the location to our call taker. The call taker thus had an easy job — he just had to check with the first policeman that the second was doing it correctly (he was) and stay on line to keep us updated.
As I’m writing this, it’s occurring to me that the number of times that I have tried to give CPR instructions and had them refused because the caller already knows how to do it is so minimal that I can count it on the fingers of… well, one finger, actually.
The ambulances (two of them, and a FRU for good measure) were on scene within five minutes (which is, incidentally, two minutes longer than a non-breathing person can survive without CPR), and then we heard nothing, until I got the blue call on the radio.
“This is T103, blue to King George’s with a 60 year old male, post cardiac arrest, was in VF, one shock given… now pulse 90, BP 130/88, respiratory rate 12… be there in 8, over…”
(Non jargon translation: “His heart wasn’t beating, but we zapped him with an electric shock thingy and it started again, and now he’s probably healthier than half the patients that get blue lighted in.”)
I felt a little bit like replying to the blue call with “Woo, T103! You got him back! Fancy that, eh? Big pat on the back!” but of course that is not professional and would interfere with notifying the hospital, so I didn’t. However, if “T103″ are reading this, I can say “well done” now, and also a big “well done” to those two policemen, without whom the patient would certainly have died.
It is, sadly, quite rare for us to get a call when a patient is brought back after cardiac arrest. Often crews blue them in still trying to resuscitate them; often they are unofficially pronounced dead at scene. So when we get a blue call like this, there’s a little celebration on the dispatch desk, and we all feel happy for a few minutes and do a little dance around the table, until the monitor shows that there’s another call coming in, and then we all go back to work and forget all about it.
