It’s strange, but every time I have to work on a desk other than my usual, high drama seems to occur. I was moved to the South East in order to train my latest victim trainee, but staffing levels were very low yesterday and the call rate went through the roof (28 calls waiting at one point — I haven’t seen it like that since one very hot Friday in 2005) and training had to be stopped so she could take calls and I could take the radio.
I used to work on the South East, but it’s all changed because recently because they closed the Central Desk and decided to combine it with the least busy sector, the South East. Never mind that this makes no sense at all geographically. Now Westminster and Bloomsbury, both parts of Central London north of the river are supposedly South East and Bromley and Beckenham, which are about as far South East as you can get have moved to South West. How confusing can you get?
Anyway, I didn’t have time to worry about the geographical incorrectness of the sector for long, because after a couple of hours we got called to a shooting, where a teenage boy was pronounced dead at the scene. (It scares me the way such calls are no longer unusual.) I was out on break so I missed most of it — it was certainly one call I’m glad I didn’t take. Half an hour later, we were called to a bus which had crashed into a car. This had been called in by a bystander who was at a distance, so we had no idea how serious it was until the first crew arrived on scene and found two people dead and a busload of people with minor injuries. There was a crew just around the corner when it happened, so we were on scene within three minutes - which was still too late to save the occupants of the car. The crew had only been there a couple of seconds when they called up telling us two people had been killed and urgently requesting more ambulances and the fire brigade.
Dealing with fatal RTAs is sometimes less traumatic for us in Control that dealing with ‘ordinary’ deaths because the calls come in from strangers, we don’t have to deal with hysterical relatives and it’s almost like you’re watching it on TV. (I imagine it’s different for the crews, who get to see horrific scenes we can only imagine). After the call is dealt with, I try to depersonalise the victims in my head as much as I can — telling myself no one cares, they have no relatives, they have no names, they are somehow not real people. If I didn’t, I’d probably end up completely depressed. It was therefore very foolish of me to search the internet for a news article about the accident and find a page full of friends and relatives paying tribute to their lost loved ones and mentioning details about them, which shatters the faceless/nameless illusion once and for all and now I’m thinking of their families getting a knock at the door and the children crying and… argh.
What better to blot this out that another twelve hour shift of the same?
July 26th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
One of my questions about ambulance and dispatch work has always been, “How in God’s name do they deal with the sadness and tragedy?”
The obvious answer is that, of course, it has to be walled off somehow, but it still looks like an impossible feat of self-control, from a distance.
It’s, I don’t know how to say it exactly, eye-opening to see some of what you struggle with!
July 26th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Yeah, we cope by a) sticking our heads in the sand and b) spending all our time whinging about/arguing with timewasters so we don’t have time to think about it…
July 27th, 2007 at 9:34 am
{hugs}
There is no way that I could do what you guys do - I’d go mad…
July 27th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
The bus crash was probably the same one that my copper mate attended. She said that she didn’t even go and look at the car because she didn’t want to see the horror and have to deal with the memories etc. I am always amazed at how she does her job and then gets on with normal life outside of work. I couldn’t do it.
July 28th, 2007 at 4:13 am
I take it the shooting was the one I read about in the news here, where the young lad was chased by a gang on bicycles.
July 29th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
But doesn’t it (the distress and horror) creep up on you and shout ‘BOO’ when you are at a low ebb yourself (I assume being an ambulance dispatcher doesn’t give you and your loved ones the right to an accident free life and immortality.) So if a you have a loved one who is ill, or even if the patient is, say, the same age as your child for example; if the call is just to ‘close to home’ how do you handle that? I suppose the ’stock’ reply would be to say ‘by being professional’ but is it that the reality?
In a centralised control the chances of taking a call for someone you know must be slim??
August 3rd, 2007 at 9:41 pm
i was wonderin, i live in south east, want to go to uni next yr to study to become a paramedic. Do u know the best way to do it? wat uni and courses etc and who to do it wiht and wat experience etc i will need? all the obvious detail! lol! thnaks xxx