I’ve had a few suggestions on my last post, and am going to be answering your questions one by one. First up, Miranda asked how one becomes a Nee Naw Worker.
Like with most other jobs, the process started with a bog standard applications form with all the usual questions about how many GCSEs you have and why you want to work for the Nee Naw Service. The LAS recruitment page is fairly non-specific about who can and can’t apply. As far as I know, there are no minimum qualifications (so I needn’t have bothered with that Master’s degree) and no specific experience you need, though I seem to recall that any kind of medical experience (I worked in a GP surgery for two years and in various very boring medical admin jobs) and any kind of telephone working (I used to work in IT support) were seen as an advantage.
Though there are no formal prerequisites, the following will (in my opinion, which in no way reflects the opinion of the Nee Naw Service) make you a lot more suited to the job:
- Basic medical knowledge.
- Experience working with impatient, abusive drunks. Try a stint at McDonalds at pub closing time and imagine getting a Big Mac in 8 minutes is a life and death matter.
- Experience working with elderly people.
- Local knowledge. This is particularly important in London where a lot of foreign residents don’t seem to know the name of the area in which they live or how to spell/pronounce it.
- Ability to get up at 5am or earlier with absolutely no room for lateness. Willingness to sacrifice weekends, social life, Christmas and the feeling of being completely awake for the forseeable future.
- A heart of steel. If you cry at Casualty, this job is not for you. Being compassionate is important, but not nearly as important as being able to take charge of a harrowing situation. If someone’s baby is not breathing, they don’t need your compassion, they need you to behave like this is a problem that can be solved.
- A thick skin. People can and will call you bad names on a daily basis. And that’s just management, hahaha.
- It also helps if you look good in green. Not many people do.
My application form was (obviously) successful and I was invited back to the Training Department in Bow to do some tests with other Nee Naw Control hopefuls. These were:
- Dictation. Someone read out a paragraph about ambulances and the Nee Naw Service and you had to write it down without making any spelling mistakes. This was pretty easy and there wasn’t any complicated medical terminology in it. In my opinion they should make this a bit harder because there are plenty of people in Control who spell “vomiting” with two Ts and make a complete hash of “diarrhoea” and it absolutely drives me up the wall.
- Logical reasoning. Lots of questions a bit like this where you have to read a passage and then say if various statements are true based on the information in the passage. I guess this is because we spend a lot time trying to squeeze information out of callers who are talking a lot of nonsense.
- Digit recall. This is the one that I thought I’d failed on. I can’t remember exactly how it worked, other than lots of numbers were read out and you had to look at a sheet and pick out the sequence you had just heard, or something like that. This sort of thing confuses me easily but it is necessary because you spend a lot of time writing down phone numbers, call signs, fleet numbers etc and you can’t go getting them muddled. I was lucky to scrape through on this one; even now I get my numbers mixed up and call L104 L401 and suchlike.
- Typing. You don’t have to be any great typist but they do measure your typing speed to make sure you’re not jabbing away one fingered as when you are call taking you need to be able to type fast to get the details up to dispatch. This was a breeze for me as with all the rubbish admin jobs and the amount of time spent on the internet I have a typing speed of 70wpm.
A couple of days after the tests, I had to make a nerve-wracking phone call to LAS recruitment from the toilets of the hospital I was working in. Much to my surprise, they told me I’d passed, even the digit test, and I was invited back for the interview proper.
I have to say it was the worst interview of my entire life. Most of the interviews I’d been to in the past went on the lines of “Do you know how to switch the computer on? Well done, you’re hired!” but this was an excrutiating affair that went on for hours. I prefer the sort of questions which you could answer from the top of your head eg. “What would you do if such and such happened…” or “Why do you like ambulances?” but there weren’t any of those, just lots of “Give us an example of when you were in a situation where [something happened]. Tell us about it and how you dealt with it.” One question was “… when someone interrupted a task you were doing to ask you to do something else” and the only example I could think of was something very lame about “I was fixing a computer then someone else asked me to, er, fix their computer and I said the first computer would have to wait because the second one was used for accessing patient records in A+E whereas the first belongs to a secretary”. I didn’t really have much relevant experience so I was plucking examples from university and rubbish temp jobs that had only lasted a couple of weeks. There was also a long lecture about uniform and sickness and how the service is very strict on these. I came over all paranoid and thought they’d been talking to my then-boss, who was constantly chastising me for late arrival and lamenting the fact I’d just had a week off with a wisdom tooth related malady. This wasn’t the case, they say that to everyone.
I don’t know if the interview went better than I thought or if they were just desperate for employees, but I got through, and here I am.
Later, in part 2: Training School!
