I often do a search for blogs that have linked to Nee Naw, and today I came across this entry by Alison Bryan, whose mother became unconscious and had to wait 45 minutes for an ambulance. First of all, I would like to reassure anyone worried that this is not a common occurrence at all. The government target for reaching such a call is eight minutes and we manage that approximately 75% of the time. I have never seen an unconscious patient have to wait longer than fifteen minutes for an ambulance (I almost always stay on line if the patient is unconscious, and believe me, the fifteen minutes can feel like days). Obviously, I work in London, where no-one is more than a couple of miles from an ambulance station, and I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but I would say such experiences are quite rare — not that this is much consolation if it happens to you!
There are two reasons why people sometimes have to wait a long time for an ambulance. The first is simply that we don’t have enough ambulances. Government, please buy us some more! The second is that people insist on calling up for flu, minor injuries, stomach aches and other non emergencies. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again: if you call for an ambulance that you could do without, you WILL be taking that ambulance away from someone who could die without it. Please think careful before you dial. I personally think the ambulance service could do with rethinking its “never say no” policy for ambulance requests and that we endanger a lot more lives by attending all these calls than we would by refusing, but that’s a whole other post.
Further down the entry, Alison mentions that her dad wanted to swear at the call taker (I can’t entirely blame him; if I had been sitting with my unconscious wife for 45 minutes I would want to swear at someone too!) but that she managed to stop him. She then goes on to say:
…This didn’t get very far when he was told to check her breathing (this was already being monitored), when all he wanted was an ambulance.
This rang a very loud bell with me and is an example of the horrible position we are in as dispatchers. Often, callers are pleading with us “just send the ambulance”, and often we would like nothing better than to send an ambulance, but all the ambulances are out, and what can we do? We can’t magic an ambulance out of thin air, we can’t tell the ambulance to chuck the patient on board out on the street and go to this call instead — all we can do is offer advice over the phone. More often than not, callers don’t want to know, even if the instructions we give them will make the difference between the patient surviving the wait or dying in the meantime. Fortunately, Alison knew that her mother’s breathing needed to be monitored, but a lot of people don’t have a clue what to do, and react angrily to being given instructions. It’s almost like they think they are being fobbed off, or that if they follow the instructions I will say “See! You can do it all yourself! Shall I cancel the ambulance now?”
No wonder so many Nee Naw Controllers leave the control room to go and work on ambulances. At least people appreciate what they do then — although of course, you still get those patients who say “You’re just an ambulance driver! I want to see a DOCTOR!” Sometimes you just can’t win…
Fortunately, Alison’s mother is reported to be “on the mend” so there is at least a semi-happy ending to the story!
