Since I posted the BBA Transcript from the Guardian last week, the EMD concerned, Katie Vallis, has shot to fame and appeared on BBC Five Live, BBC News, ITV News, GMTV and in The Sun and The Mail! I think it’s brilliant that the ambulance service, and the control room in particular, are getting some positive recognition for once. Normally, whenever we end up in the papers it’s because someone has made a mistake or had to wait too long for an ambulance and it is somewhat demoralising to have all the good things the service does overlooked to dwell on the rare occasions when things go wrong. Us people in the control room are particularly overlooked. Successful resuses, BBAs, choking toddlers saved, people talked out of suicide… I’ve done all these and never received so much as a thank you letter!

Despite this, I was rather baffled by the amount of media attention this call got. BBAs, you see, are not all that unusual. I’ve been involved in two in the last week, one as a call taker and one as an allocator. (What to do as an allocator when faced with a BBA: Send two ambulances, one of which must contain a paramedic, arrange a midwife, arrange a car to pick the midwife up, cross fingers.) Every single person in the room has done one at some point (except for the newbies, who will be eagerly awaiting their first!) so it seemed odd that it made the international news because being on the news implies to me that the event is unusual and not in the normal line of someone going about their job. Having listened to the recording, it’s clear that Katie is spot on word perfect and should be held up in training school for years to come as a shining example… but she’s still just doing her job. It’s not that I resent her her fifteen minutes of fame, because it’s better one person gets some recognition than no one at all, and I had my own when I (one EMD out of around 100 on duty on July 7th 2005) was invited to 10 Downing Street to meet Tony Blair. It just worries me that the press obviously don’t know we can save lives and deliver babies and the like, and see us as phone gimps who bark out irrelevant questions and stand in the way of people getting ambulances.

Still, more stories like this in the national press, more programmes like the recent London Ambulance series, more people reading Nee Naw, and maybe that will start to change!

Mind you, I wouldn’t like to have the tape of my most recent BBA trotted out in public! It did not exactly go smoothly. The father was driving the mother-to-be to hospital, when he realised he would not make it in time. Unfortunately, this realisation came in the middle of a busy road. Panicking, he stopped the car and dialled 999. I answered. He was obviously causing something of an obstruction. I could hardly hear him over the noise of horns beeping and his wife screaming. After getting the vital details, he pulled the car over to the side of the road. This happened to be next to a busy tube station. It was around 9am, and hundreds of commuters were pouring past, gawping. The husband attempted to get into the back of the car with his wife, who was screaming things in a language I didn’t understand. I could guess what she meant, though - we didn’t have long until the baby came. I got him to instruct her to lie down, stripped below the waist (thank god she wasn’t wearing trousers!) and look for the head. It appeared a few seconds later, and thankfully the rest of the baby followed smoothly. It was particularly difficult for me to follow what was going on because the husband was talking to the wife in Foreign and a million transfixed commuters were shouting in the background and dialling 999 on their mobiles, seemingly just to clog our switchboards as they could see the father was talking to me!

Now, the vital question. “Is the baby crying or breathing?” Fortunately he/she (I never even got to find out which!) was, though I couldn’t hear it all over the pandemonium. It seemed to take forever for the ambulance to turn up - though it was running from nearby, it booked a delay due to traffic - probably the same traffic which had caused this situation in the first place, exacerbated by the growing crowd of rubberneckers! I could hear the wife getting quite distressed and crying and screaming in the background and was worried that something was going wrong. The husband assured me that nothing was wrong except for the fact that she’d just had a baby on the back seat of a car in the middle of London in rush hour in front of hundreds of people. Which, I guess, is a good reason to be crying. I encouraged husband to calm her down and wipe off the baby and give it to her and all that stuff, which kind of kept things under control until the ambulance arrived.

I have never been so glad to hear those nee naw sirens in the distance in all my life! Definitely not one for the BBC!

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