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!
December 4th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Mark
Good to see you back mate! Missed your tales recently. Luckily (or unluckily, depends how you see it) I will miss the crimbo rush as I don’t start training until January. Can’t wait though…
December 4th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
‘cerebrally irritated’
What a beautiful euphemism.
December 4th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Interested by your note about people not knowing where they are when they phone 999.
I had the opposite happen to me the other day - we had a lady collapse at our stables, which are basically just a set of huts in a large field. When I phoned 999 I was told that they couldn’t find me unless they had a postcode (and I don’t think they give postcodes to fields anyway, but I certainly didn’t have one).
I could describe exactly how to reach me, giving directions from the nearest town and with road names - but the dispatcher just couldn’t help without a postcode. In the end I ran to the nearest house (nearly rendering myself in need of emergency treatment for unfitness) and got their postcode. The dispatcher then sorted it out and the ambulance (from Surrey, not LAS which had taken my call) arrived very quickly - presumably they just recognised the road names?)
So - what’s the correct protocol here - do you have access to multimap or similar? or can you only work off postcodes? I ask because, as a horserider, I am more likely to find myself or a companion in need of an ambulance when I’m in the back of beyond somewhere, as horses always choose the most inaccessible spot to dump you out of the saddle!
I’m very appreciative of the great service you guys do - and I just want to be able to do MY bit ok.
December 4th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Depending on where you are, you need a postcode (the first part only) or an area name. The computer won’t work without them. We don’t have access to multimap, but we do have map books. I suspect what happened is that the call taker used your directions (and maybe the phone signal, though that’s not exact) to work out where you were him/herself, but made you run to the nearest house to get it anyway, in case he/she had it wrong. This is something I often do, and sometimes I get caught out because the ambulance actually turns up whilst I’m going “nope, we need a full address, find me the postal area please…”
December 4th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Every area in the UK has a postcode believe it or not, even fields!
It may not be N22 4XX but it falls under the N22 area….Anyway, we dont *DO* fields in London, its so Un-City like ha ha
December 4th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
That’s very helpful. Thanks to you both,
Actually it’s pretty much what happened to me - the dispatcher was just saying ‘oh yes, I’ve found where you are’ and I started hearing the siren.
I shall now go away and at least learn the FIRST bit of the postcodes around where I ride.
December 5th, 2007 at 5:20 am
It’s good to hear that you’re still alive. Neither you nor whatshisname over at I Like Curry have posted in months and I had started to get worried. Again..good to hear from you.
December 5th, 2007 at 10:00 am
When my husband stopped to help at an accident on one of our wild and infamous roads, something to do with the ‘cell’ of the mobile phone network took his call to a totally different regions control, He had great difficulty trying to explain his location. Because he didn’t know the name of the road, or the post code, locally and I am sure, to emergency services in our regions control room the road is simply known by the name of the pub at the summit, not by the name in the map book; frustrating for all concerned.
Accidents are so common on this road, the ambulance could have been dispatched on auto pilot.
http://uphilldowndale.wordpress.com/2007/06/16/the-killing-season/
December 5th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Most people that don’t have a clue where they are usually get frustrated, hysterical and/or abusive and speak to you like you’re a moron because YOU don’t know where THEY are “you know!! I’m on that main junction by The Tigers Head, the big pub, opposite the Tesco!! FFS I don’t know what the road is called!!!” Or people that assume just because they’re near somewhere which is supposedly well known that the call taker should know exactly where to send help, like they know all road names and postal area/district names off the top of their head for the entire area of London “I’m outside the entrance of the Excel centre, it’s in East London innit, what you never heard of the Excel centre?!”… hmm frustrating for all concerned.
If you don’t know where you are, then don’t bother calling the ambulance I say. Walk along until you reach a road sign, ask someone around you THEN dial. Even better let someone else who knows where they are make the call. There’s a good chance there’s at least 5 other people on their mobiles at the same time as you anyway.
December 5th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Dear Sir / Madam
I am writing to inform you of a New Defence and Security Organisation, The UK National Defence Association recently established in the Uk and headed by Senior Members of the Armed Forces, the aim of said Organisation is to Lobby for Better funding for our Armed Services so that they may better be able to Protect this country and Its People.
Would you be willing to Link to this Organisations website (details Below) and would you be willing to forward the Link on to any / all of your contacts.
Membership is Open to ALL Uk Citizens, concerned about matters of security.
Thank you
Founding Paper.
http://www.uknda.org/my_documents/my_files/NDA-FOUNDING-PAPER.pdf
UKNDA Chairmans Column
http://www.uknda.org/chairmans_column/c-12.html
Home Page
http://www.uknda.org/
Also, can you support this worthy cause, send a Pressie to our Brave Troops, sent to fight a
War in the Gulf.
http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2007/12/send-parcel-to-our-boysgirls-in-itaq.html#links
Could you Post out to all your contacts, asking them to do the same.
December 6th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Out here in the boonies, you consider yourself lucky if you can get mobile reception or find a bystander who knows where you are. And unless you’re on an A-road, you’re almost never going to get five bystanders with mobiles that work.
But if you do manage to get mobile reception and you do happen to have the exact post code, then you’re going to run into two further problems.
First, in the country post codes can cover very large areas. I went to a farm in the Scottish Borders recently, but was suspicious of the alleged location according to the sat nav system. I also had a current road atlas and an OS Landranger, from which I could see the place names didn’t quite fit with what the sat nav was telling me. It turned out the sat nav was eight miles out because the post code covered a number of farms over a very large area. (Our croft has a post code shared by five places that exist and two that don’t, not all of which are in sight of each other or of the road)
The second problem with sat nav is that it tends to use classified roads in a cascading order of preference. So when a neighbouring farm burned down, sat nav sent the appliances along an A-road, then a B-road and then deposited them on the other side of the valley to the fire - with no linking roads, plus a two hillsides, a railway and a burn in between. I’d told the call taker the fastest route was along a different A-road, then along an unclassified road for five miles, but they went for the sat nav, which cost about 15 minutes.
When we have need for the emergency services at or near the croft, we give the post code of the croft, the full address, the OS Landranger grid reference, and directions from the village (one side) or the A-road (five miles the other way). Unfortunately, the increasing centralisation and computerisation means most of this, bar the post code, is ignored, while the various services’ call takers don’t have the local knowledge to compensate.
Oh, and OS maps don’t seem to be widely used any more, either. I don’t expect crews to have them, but I’d have thought control rooms would - especially if covering country areas.
It’s a different world out here.
December 6th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
I checked my rota when that memo about the £750 came out - I actually get it without doing any overtime - I’m working days Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day - that whole week is 5 days of 10 hour shifts, so I only need another 22 hours, and I get that on nights New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day.
Looking forward to that in my January pay!
December 7th, 2007 at 11:57 am
I must say, as a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award participant it greatly worries me when control insist on a postcode or general area. Computers don’t recognise things like “Fylingdales CP” as my map is telling me, and the word “Whitby” would not get me any closer as it is a totally different sector.
I always carry a full OS map with the group, as well as the route card with escape grid refs, etc.
Now, personally, my laptop (often with me - even DofE) has AutoRoute2003 and this is capable of taking an 8-fig and telling me where I am, so is multimap, so is ordnancesurvey.co.uk, and so on.
Why can’t AMPDS handle OS 8 figure gird references?
December 7th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Well technically AMPDS doesn’t have anything to do with the location. AMPDS just does the triaging part. Location finding is down to whatever cad software the service uses. The London cad system can take eastings and northings but not many calltakers seem aware of this..
December 8th, 2007 at 4:54 am
My patch covers a large rural area, and it gets very busy during the summer.
The mapping system we have will show footpaths, streams, electricity lines etc. So if your out for a walk the best advice is to know where you came from, where you left the “main road” and an OS reference.
The trouble with the post codes is not so much pin pointing where you are on the map, as getting that location into the computer.
When we send details to a crew the satnav is specially wired in, so it saves valuable time with the crew not having to program it (which incidently is why they don’t work in civilian cars, not that the thieves care). So while you may know where you are, and the call taker may know where you are, us Dispatchers are screaming in the background because all we can do is get a crew to head off in the right direction while we wait for something to be inputed into the computer so we can send it down.
If it’s a local crew covering their own patch, it’s not so bad. However there is a fairly good chance it’s not a local crew and they don’t know the area so well.
On a side note, I have a handy website on my computer at work that can convert GPS, OS, Lat&Long and anything else you can think of. Had a chap last year reeling off a massive list of coordinates from his cutting edge satnav pinpointing his exact location, and was getting rather irate because we didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
December 8th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
I cannot believe you are getting a bonus for working in the festive period - nhs staff nurses up and down the country are working from dec 24th til jan because that’s what they’ve been rostersd on for without any kind of recognition. 999 services are a 24/7 265 service - you are effectively getting a bonus for doing your job. No offenense intended but j hope you appreciate how lucky you are
December 9th, 2007 at 12:35 am
Believe me - we do appreciate the bonus. Last year we didn’t get anything and manning was appalling. On the other hand, there are plenty of non emergency workers who get a bonus at Christmas for doing nothing other than working all year, so please don’t begrudge us it. Of course I think you nurses should get it too, but it’s better that some of us get it that none of us.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
“24/7 265″
Please, can I have a job where I get 100 days off in a year?
December 12th, 2007 at 10:02 am
Matt - its called being a teacher lol.
December 17th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
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