Nee Naw

I don’t know whether I am coming or going any more! I got back from a month’s annual leave (yes, colleagues, if you were wondering why no one can get leave at the moment, it’s because I nabbed it all) in aid of my 30th birthday (I needed time off to get used to the horror of being that old) and found I was back training Trainee Number 2, this time on dispatch. I was given a grand total of thirty seconds to prepare for this! After a month off I found I had forgotten how to do my job myself, let alone teach someone else to do it, so this wasn’t a great start. Anyway, just as everything was starting to come together and Trainee 2 was just about to start flying solo, the poor girl goes and ends up in hospital! Nothing too serious, fortunately, and she will be back soon. (Get well soon, Trainee 2, if you are reading!) So at this point, enter Trainee 3. And then half the control room went off sick, so I had to be the radio operator and train someone on dispatch at the same time. The confusion!

As I mentioned before, I am useless at training at the best of times so I am not sure if I actually managed to impart any useful information at all. Training people on dispatch is rather different from call taking. In a way, it is easier, because you spend most of the time talking to crews/hospitals/other professionals who tend to be politer, less drunk and more helpful than the general public. (There are exceptions, unfortunately.) On the other hand, after six months on call taking you have heard pretty much everything. Granted, there is the odd call that makes you go WTF (eg. “My girlfriend has a razor blade stuck in her vagina”. We actually had this the other night.) but in general it’s the same things over and over again and it ends up being a case of “Your head has fallen off? Okay. Are you breathing normally? Put your dogs away and meet the ambulance…” Up on dispatch, there’s always new things happening, and even after three years doing this job I’m still coming across new things. There are some staple occurrences that happen pretty much every night and examples of these are:

1) Crew: “We can’t find this address! The MDT is taking us into a graveyard! Help!”
2) Crew: “Er… this is Tolworth… this job you sent us in Hornchurch… are you SURE we’re the nearest?”
3) Crew: “You’ve put us on our lunch break! But we can’t have a lunch break, because there are rats on the station, there’s an R in the month and anyway, our break window doesn’t start for fifteen seconds.”
4) Sector Controller: “Please ring back this woman with a spot on the nose every two minutes apologising for the delay and mentioning the word “EMERGENCY” a lot until she gets the hint and goes out and buys some Clearasil.”
5) Crew: “We’ve just driven 3 miles on blue lights to a baby with flu and now the parents are refusing to go to hospital. Could you please arrange a GP visit like they should have in the first place?”
6) Sector Controller: “We’ve got a BBA (Born Before Arrival) in Walthamstow! The mother is booked under a hospital in Manchester! Please spend the next half hour ringing every hospital in East London and arguing about who should send a midwife!”
7) Crew: “Hello, please note on our ticket that there are TERRIBLE delays booking in at Newham today. This is in no way related to the fact it is ten past four and we are about to miss our break and thus get our compensatory payment”.
8) Crew: “We’ve got a patient who has taken 59 paracetamols, 72 horse tranquilisers and half a gallon of whisky and won’t go to hospital because she thinks she will be fine. Please could you ring Guy’s Poisons Information Service and get some scary information about what this will do to her insides so we can persuade her”.

And so on. Less common occurrences that we have had recently include:

1) “This is Dagenham Ambulance Station! Please get in touch with K602 quickly! We’ve had a tree fall down in the car park outside and it’s landed on his car and crushed it to bits!” (I had to break this news. You can guess how popular I was. I bet K602 wished I was putting them on meal break…)
2) “This is T803. We’re going to have to go off the road because my crewmate has just had a message that her brother has been in a serious road traffic accident somewhere up in Remote Northern County. Oh, and could you see if you could find out any information, she’d be really grateful…”
3) “This is K801. Please could you settle an argument. How do you spell ‘apparent’?”
4) “This is SE69. Could you please pass on a message from the caller of cad 59. He says he is sorry he was rude on the phone, he was panicking, but the baby is fine now and thank you very much for all your help.” (No, this doesn’t happen often, but it’s great when it does.)

And finally…

5) “Hello, this is S418. We’ve just done cad 880 - the suspended baby. We thought you’d like to know what happened. The call was given, and we scooped and ran to the hospital. The hospital staff worked on the baby for half an hour, and they were just about to call time of death when they stopped resus and gave the baby to the dad to hold. The nurse noticed the baby was starting to make some respiratory effort, and they started to work again. The baby is now breathing unaided, and the doctors think he is going to be okay.”