I think it was Reynolds who started calling Care Homes “Don’t Care Homes” or “Couldn’t Care Less Homes”. I, too, have had a few run ins with less-than-caring staff in these places, but this one really took the biscuit.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“This is the Blackbird Care Home, we need an ambulance,” said the woman, not answering my question.
“And what’s the problem?” I asked again.
“A lady has had a fall,” she told me.
“What’s your address?” I asked. After a protracted struggle to get the address out of her, where she repeatedly gives the name of the care home, the phone number, the fact that it is in London, the fact that they are a residential care home for the elderly… anything but the address, we move on to the standard questions. This sounds like a pretty routine call: elderly people fall over all the time, most are uninjured and just need picking up and checking over.
“Are you with her now?” I asked.
“No,” said the woman. “She’s out on the roof. She fell out the window.” She said this in the manner that one would say “My washing machine is broken” or “It was raining yesterday.”
“!!!” I said. Don’t ask me how that is pronounced. I’d just spent several minutes trying to get the woman to confirm her address, valuable time during which we could be sending HEMS, ambulances and the Fire Brigade, and all the time the patient has been lying on a rooftop. Eventually, painstakingly, with her managing to provide an irrelevant answer to each question (eg. “How far did she fall? From the window to the roof. What caused the fall? She had breakfast this morning.”) I managed to extract the information that she’d fallen approximately one storey, and that she was only partly visible, so no-one could see how badly injured she was, but she wasn’t moving. All along, the woman expressed no indication that this might be a problem, or any kind of concern in her voice. I did say that I don’t like callers to panic, but this was taking it to the opposite extreme!
“How are we going to get to her?” I asked finally. The ambulance was almost there by now. “Is there a way out to the roof, or do we need to get to the fire brigade?”
The dispatch desk had actually already called the fire brigade, having got bored waiting for me to extract information from this incredibly obstructive individual.
“Okay,” she said, yawning.
“That was a question!” I said. “Can we get to the roof safely, or do we need the fire brigade?”
“Okay,” she said again. I gave up at this point and was about to hang up.
“Oh,” she said as an afterthought. “We have a ladder. Should someone go up and see her?”
“That might be a good idea,” I said. Had this brainwave not occurred to anyone before?
As soon as I’d hung up, the Sector Controller from the dispatch desk rang me, full of incredulation at the woman’s nonchalant attitude and speculated that it might be a hoax — perhaps one of the other elderly patients had got bored and decided to liven up their day with some blue lights and sirens?
It wasn’t a hoax. The patient was dead.
I have added the name of that Care Home to the growing list of “Places Not To Send My Mother To When She Gets Old”.
