Abusive Callers again
On my last post about abusive callers, Dave asked: Is much of the abuse you receive related to the panic of the patient or the people who care about him/her? Or is it generally just abusive drunkenness? I think this is a good question, good enough to warrant a post of its own in a reply. Here, in my opinion, are the reasons why people are rude/abusive and the types of rudeness that result.
1) Personality of the caller. You can’t really do anything about this one except try not to make the situation worse. Some people are just plain rude. Sometimes it’s a psychiatric problem, sometimes they just aren’t very nice. For some reason, rude people are forever calling 999, possibly because they have an exaggerated sense of entitlement, or because they like taking charge of situations.
2) Panic. Yes, panic is definitely a factor. Panicking people tend to lose all track of time (so they think the ambulance is taking ages, and get angry) and have difficulty listening to what you are saying (causing frustration, because they don’t understand what you are going on about) and it all comes out in a big rush of “Just f***ing help me or I’ll sue you!” Often by the end of the call they’ve calmed down and apologise or say thank you. Occasionally they even get the crews to ring control with an apology for the call taker.
3) Alcohol. Definitely encourages rudeness, especially coupled with factor 1. Also encourages blathering and unhelpfulness. Drunken callers are definitely not my favourites.
4) Not knowing the system. Callers get frustrated because they have to answer lots of questions and because we don’t know where “the big road near Tesco’s in West London” is. They expect it to be like it is on TV. They think that if they are asked to do something to help the patient, we are trying to fob them off. They think that we should be telling them something more concrete at the end of the call (eg. “we’ve dispatched an ambulance from Homerton and it will be with you in three minutes” rather than “if his condition worsens, call back immediately for further instructions”).
5) Attitude of the call taker. As Big Al remarked on the last post, some call takers seem to get more than their fair share of grief because of the way they react to rude callers. Getting cross is obviously a big no no, but I think we’ve all had moments when we’re exhausted and some horrible is shouting the odds at you that you snap and answer back in a manner not depicted in any customer care manual. There are other ways in which we accidentally antagonise callers too. You constantly have to weigh up how the caller wants you to be and change your manner accordingly. Sometimes they feel we are too blaze and it comforts them if we pretend to be shocked at whatever they are reporting — but go too far and they will lose confidence in your ability to cope. Interrupt too little, and the callers will waffle on, too much and they will get annoyed. Speak too fast and they will not understand you, too slowly and they will feel you have no sense of urgency. It’s a constant balancing act, and given that we are not exactly getting callers when they are at their best, it’s very easy to overbalance.
So now imagine a call where the caller is drunk, panicking, doesn’t know the system, not a very nice person at the best of times, and doesn’t think you’re taking his situation very seriously. Yes, all five factors equals Call Taker gets an Earful. It’s very rare to get a call from someone who is nice, calm and sober, knows the system and who you respond correctly to and manage not to upset, thus almost every call leads to varying degrees of Earful.
Fortunately, we all have thick skins.
on March 28th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
I’ve only phoned for an ambulance once, when I witnessed an RTA and stopped to help. I seriously can’t imagine ever giving the call taker an earful though. They’re there to help, not to hinder.
Of course, the situation wasn’t too bad because the only casualty was conscious and talking, and also the fact that I was a stranger helped.
If I was in an RTA involving my dad, for example, I can imagine I’d be very upset and would probably act quite differently.
Every situation is different though - a caller could be abusive towards you if they were panicking about their husband who’d collapsed, but would be calm and nice towards you if they were calling about someone they didn’t know.
on March 28th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
In my experience, they are *more* likely to be rude if they are calling about someone they don’t know — because that’s when we are likely to ask them questions they don’t know the answer to, or they can’t give us a good enough location. Because they don’t have anything to gain by helping the stranger, they feel “hassled” by being asked questions and asked to do things by the call taker. This is where you get the “I was only doing my duty by calling, I didn’t expect all THIS” type comments.
on March 28th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Re the “blase” comment.
I’ve heard from a couple of people who received ambulance care recently that they thought the ambulance officers lacked urgency when approaching the scene.
Another problem with TV, they expect a huge handbrake turn, slamming against the curb. The back doors fly open and an ambulance officer dives out, oxygen bottle tucked under one arm, breaks into a roll then breaks the world sprint record up the stairs to the patient.
I explained how things work (we get an idea of serious the situation is by looking at *you*, fast scene approach = bad scene size up, etc etc), but I can definitely see why, to the untrained eye, the AOs look like they are just being lazy.
A problem that will never be resolved; the public has very little knowledge of how the ambulance system works and therefore don’t understand how we are doing our jobs.
on March 29th, 2007 at 12:08 am
I had cause to phone for an ambulnce twice last summer for my partner, first time he was sent home with indigestion and the second time ( 4 Days later ) he was admitted with an M.I.on both occasions i kept calm and never once got abusive or irritated with the call taker, after all they are there to help, so how can you say that almost every call results in an earfull for the taker is surprising to me,im not having a go at you but to generalize all callers as abusive is a bit much for me to take.Oh and i even thanked the call taker for their help.
on March 29th, 2007 at 5:25 am
Sorry Kathryn - of course you’re right, some callers are polite and even say thank you. What I meant was not that every caller is abusive, but that every call has the potential to ‘trigger’ a bad reaction of some type from the caller, and that most do, although it’s usually little things like being urged to hurry up rather than actually being abused. Calm, polite people are definitely not the norm, and believe me, we are grateful when we get people like you calling in!
on March 30th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
I work at a rail station and have to call for an ambulance reasonably regularly, i often find that although the railway switchboard give the location and call back number the call taker asks for it again; i assume that this is a proceedure thing tho?
The most annoying things are my colleagues who don’t seem to anticipate that i’ll have to ask them the questions and the public who, in general, as you have already said expect an ambulance to appear out of thin air for their wee scratch.
on April 10th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
Well I’m an EMD for Yorkshire Ambulance, and sadly I recognise the callers Mark is describing very well!
However I did have a lovely lady on the phone today - she wins Nicest Caller of The Month (if such a thing existed)! She was at a country park, which is approached by a road with no houses on it, which means our c**p address-finding-computer-system said that road did not exist in our county. So tried other adjacent roads etc - all a big ‘computer says no’ for each one. Eventually we had to resort to a good old fashioned map book, look up the road she was telling me, see the park, and then type in a not-very-nearby road just so we could create an incident address and issue it to a crew. This took about 10 times (I checked) longer than the average time it takes to do an address/tel number/repeat address scenario for most residential addresses. Throughout it all she was calm, polite, saying no problem, it’s ok, and repeating and confirming bits of the location SO patiently. Made my day!
Sadly the people who bother to read this blog are not the same people who ring up and shout “just get me a f*****g ambulance” at us when they haven’t even given us the address yet.
Tip for you all - how to antagonise your call taker - tell them to hurry up it’s an emergency. Gets us every time…
on April 13th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
hurry up it’s an emergency
Ooh! Don’t get me started! I feel like retorting “Yes, every call is an emergency because this is an EMERGENCY AMBULANCE SERVICE, doofus!” or suchlike. Mind you, we do take our fair shares of calls that *aren’t* emergencies, so I suppose they do have a point of sorts!
on April 24th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Wow, thanks for the full-length address.
Much as I hope I never have to call you guys - no offence intended - I shall hold my tongue as best as the circumstances allow (if rocks fall and everybody dies there *might* be some swearing).
Re: 3) Alcohol. Forgive the naïvite of a Uni student not yet exposed to the true depths of the real world, but I’d never expected “because I/he/she was drunk” to be a reason, a mitigating factor, an excuse or an inference to the best explanation (when nobody was sober enough to remember what *actually* happened) for quite so much in this world, from falling down to beating someone up to forgetting the bills to throwing a punch at an underpaid, abused public sector worker. It’s terrifying. And I pity those of you who have to work with it as much as you do for its twin effects of rendering people less capable of taking care of themselves and less capable of getting/accepting help. And I admire those of you who can cope.
~Dave
P.S. Laconic wit will help you stress-relieve, and the average drunk won’t even notice they’re being insulted.
on May 3rd, 2007 at 2:44 pm
How sad that such a dedicated bunch of people have to deal with abuse calls.
I’ve phoned for an ambulance once (pregnant woman on our doorstep at 2:00 am) and been with family phoning for ambulances.. eight times? Maybe nine. We’ve literally had lives saved in our family more than once.
I’ve dealt with stupid doctors and grumpy nurses, but I’ve never met “bad” or impatient paramedic or ambulance personnel. Admittedly all of the above (except one stupid doctor) were in Africa, not the UK.
Great blog, BTW. I have an ex-paramedic friend (now a surgical nurse) in the USA I will be recommending your blog to.