East of England Ambulance Service - SHOCK NEWS!

East of England Ambulance Service - SHOCK NEWS!

BBC Television's Look East programme on Friday 10th October featured a Norfolk MP suggesting that the EEAS is too large, covering, or trying to cover, six English counties. He said that the more heavily populated counties such as Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire (and South Essex?) tend to pull resources from rural areas such as Norfolk and Suffolk, impeding their response times.

Originally the six counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Essex and Hertfordshire happily operated their individual ambulance services, with their own uniforms, protocols, languages and traditions. But under government reorganisation amalgamated into the one huge colossus we all love and cherish.

'Too large' is nonsense according to a top secret government report I've unearthed. EEAS too large? Not a bit of it. It's TOO SMALL apparently.  These plans - drawn up by a likely youngster on IT work experience and high on Red Bull probably - state that the East of England Ambulance Service should enlarge their empire; to be the World Ambulance Service.

The restructure will be achieved  in two stages:

First Stage: The UK Ambulance Service. 'All counties of the UK will be united' - the report's words, not mine. The report does not go into details but the plan would be implemented by the private company with the lowest tender and no scruples who state that they will manage it. This would increase efficiency and decrease the number of highly paid executives and administration staff - as it did when the six counties amalgamated (allegedly). The shortage of paramedics is acknowledged as a problem but would be easily solved by increasing all shifts to 20 hours with no breaks, and if the emergency calls kept rolling in, be expected to work in perpetuity.  New paramedics and battle-weary veterans would all have to sign a No-homelife Agreement. Generous pensions on reaching eighty years of age on the frontline however.

Second Stage: The World Ambulance Service. And here's the clever bit. All Frontline staff would be made redundant and replaced by medical call centres. These would be automated with no staff. Would-be patients would go through their own diagnostic algorithm via computer or phone in their own language, which would eventually ascertain after 75 probing questions that they do not need medical assistance at all, but invite them to sign up to the WAS newsletter. The contact page would list no contacts.

I've just made a preliminary approach to an high-graded official with an immense salary, within the present ambulance service, to ask their view. My initial question:

 'Firstly Mr ******* , right now, how are you going to solve the immediate problem of the non-retention of the newly qualified, and the haemorrhaging of experienced paramedics?'

'Well, we have a new strategy. We've tried bribing from other counties with golden hellos. And we've tried importing from abroad. It's not working. We are now going to have a recruitment drive on Mars - they've just found life there I'm told.'

That would mean The Solar Ambulance Service. (SAS.) Now that would be stupid - wouldn't it?

I'm going to put my Paramedic Diary blog on ice as there are several very good similar bloggers out there already. I can always add something compelling in the future.

I'm going to commence with a new blog soon: 'Keeping up with Jones' - similar to my newspaper column but bloggified and covering all things wide and wonderful, with a humorous twist, and see how it goes.

See you soon!

It's been a long time. Apologies to anyone offended. I am now in the process of recommencing a blog. I'm now a retired paramedic. On the front line till seventy, a U.K Record? Probably not.
I wrote a humour column for the Hertfordshire Mercury for 13 years: Keeping up with Jones and my blog will be a similar format. All observational and good fun. It was very popular.
Just let me get round this blog technology.

It's been very quiet on the response front, but as I couldn't find my own Blog via the search engine, how could anyone else?

So I've renamed it to find out if I've been playing hard to get or there's just no interest out there.

Some crews get lots of trauma, they cannot seem to avoid it. Often they come across challenging situations on the way to work, or volunteers from the general public collapse in front of them in the aisle of a supermarket when they are doing their weekly shop. They even get knocks on their door in the middle of the night from worried mums clutching their sick babies.

Not me. And I don't get a lot of trauma either - but like proverbial London Buses, after a long wait they are now all coming at the same time. Serious trauma can result in having to write a Coroners Statement: it's a bit like a police statement, and I'm now knee deep in legal paperwork. They are a bind (you are expected to write them on shift which can result in repetition or if very busy, nothing at all) but they do make you think back and remember every single detail of an event.

I'm hoping that this change of luck does not mean that mums will start queuing outside my door at night with their snotty sickly offspring - I get enough of that with my own kids . . . and they're over 20!

Paramedic Diary

Tom Reynolds: Ambulance Blogger for several years (brilliant Tom - why didn't I think of it first) has encouraged me to commence an occasional diary from an ambulance paramedic working in a completely different area within the UK.

Patient confidentiality will be observed and situations may be 'doctored' to protect identities.

Just off nights and suffering the usual jet lag, but one routine job stands out from the midnight haze of ubiquitous alcoholics: a group of drunken women supporting one of their own with a minor head wound (from an alleged assault) have requested an ambulance. Two community policemen are holding court, trying to make sense of six drunken and conflicting accounts of what happened.

We (two paramedics/technicians normally comprise the crew) arrived and parked close by. Our slurring patient (from the alcohol, not the head wound we concluded) is escorted by probably the most drunken of this little bevy of boozers. The patient's friend looked hardened by life, possibly an alcoholic and by the look of her, might have recently taken drugs I guessed. Said lady gesticulated her cigarette in a dangerous fashion far too close to our faces for comfort to emphasize how much she loved the patient and that we should take care of her and take her to hospital immediately. Not as succinctly as that obviously, but that was about the gist of it. Then she slurred, swayed and exhaled that she was a nurse and had to be on duty the next day.

I heard two synchronized clicks as the community policemen's jaws dropped open in amazement. One whispered rhetorically in my ear that she would be in no state to manage a patient, let alone a hangover. The other questioned how she could possibly be a qualified nurse. We did not interrogate further to check this out - no point, and took the easy route - straight to Casualty.

And the moral is: don't prejudge a situation, patient or their friends. You might get it right most of the time, but not all of the time. And in this case: who knows?

Well: that's my first effort. What does the blogging world think? I may continue blogging - and I may not.