While offices all over the world are steady winding down for Christmas, Nee Naw Control just gets busier and busier. The cold weather has a negative effect on the elderly and festive drinking does little for the young. Staffing levels are not great, because everyone’s off with the flu, and the overall result is one of Too Many Calls, Not Enough Ambulances. I was just about managing to keep on top of it by getting the poor radio op to lose her voice broadcasting the calls we were holding and cajoling the long suffering ambulances turn around a little bit quicker at hospital.
Then the call which was to be the final straw came in. A car hit a motorcyclist on a busy, fast road right in the middle of my patch. The car actually drove over the top of the motorcyclist before it managed to stop. He had serious head and chest injuries. About twenty calls came in at once from panicked bystanders, and as is the way with bystanders, only about half of them had the address right and only half of them knew what had happened (some said a pedestrian had been hit by a car, some said someone had fallen off his bike, some just knew a man was lying in the middle of the road), resulting in a spattering of similar sounding calls around the area. The danger in situations like these is that one might assume they are all the same call, when really there have been two similar incidents in the area, so three ambulances were started whilst the call takers managed to ascertain that there really only was one incident. One ambulance was then cancelled. I kept two running because the general consensus was that the person was unconscious, and two callers seemed to think he was also not breathing. Unfortunately, HEMS could not be dispatched because it was co-incidentally dealing with another call on my patch (a child who’d fallen down concrete steps and sustained a serious head injury with a GCS of 3 - ie. completely unconscious) but the HEMS team in the control room spoke to the crew on the phone to give them advice.
The advice of the HEMS team was to get the patient to the Royal London Hospital as quickly as possible. This is the hospital the helicopter operates from and it has advanced trauma care and a neuro department. The crew were just heading off when they hit a stumbling block - the patient had come round and was what we call ‘cerebrally irritated’ - in other words, his head injury made him confused and violent and he was lashing out at the crew that were trying to help him. There were already three paramedics/technicians on the back of the ambulance but they were unable to restrain him. They radioed for urgent police and another crew. These were all sent straight away, along with the duty manager. So there was now:
Five paramedics/technicians in the back of the ambulance treating the patient.
One driving the ambulance.
An unknown number of police restraining the patient.
A manager making sure the crew are okay.
An FRU still at the scene of the accident checking over the bystanders and the car driver and babysitting all the empty vehicles.
I am not even sure how all those people managed to fit in the back of the ambulance. They decided to take him to the local A+E to get his condition stabilised, rather than make the long trip to the Royal London. The local A+E most probably organised another ambulance transfer to the Royal London for specialist care later.
So that was it for the ambulance cover on my patch. Three ambulances down is a whole stations worth and my calls were mounting up. I had a call in to a 33 year old male in cardiac arrest and had absolutely nothing to send to it. My neck was saved by a very kind offer from a crew who had actually finished their shift and were taking the vehicle back to station who offered up for some impromptu overtime. In the end, the patient was beyond any help, but it’s not a chance you want to be taking. I was so stressed when I left the building I thought my head was going to explode! I was really grateful that I’d taken today off to attend the most important football match of the season (Leyton Orient vs Millwall).
Fortunately, this situation is unlikely to arise over the festive period as management have got wise and offered us (control and road staff) a £750 bonus on the condition we work 72 hours over Christmas including two bank holidays and aren’t late or sick at all in that time. As you can imagine, everyone has suddenly put their name down for overtime and manning is going to be at full whack!