When you become an emergency call handler, you expect that you are going to have to deal with some pretty harrowing calls. Calls made by people who perhaps are experiencing one of the worst days of their life.
What you don’t expect, however, is that someone will call 999 and request the ambulance service, in order to complain about an emergency ambulance being parked across their drive.
It turns out, that the Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) crew were at an adjacent address, trying to save the life of a patient.
YAS Control Room Team Leader, Helen Smith, tweeted about the call made by the member of the public who thought that the best way of getting in contact with the ambulance service regarding the vehicle that was parked across their drive, was to dial 999.
So what should you do, if you wake up to find an emergency ambulance blocking your driveway?
You should wait for the ambulance crew to finish dealing with their patient. That’s what you should do.
Emergency Ambulance crews will not spend 10-15 minutes looking for a suitable parking space, before rushing to the aid of a patient who is perhaps on the brink of life and death.
If you, or a member of your family, needed the life-saving help of an emergency ambulance crew, would you expect them to spend 10-15 minutes driving around, looking for a suitable place to park?
Of course you wouldn’t.
In what should be a fine display of common sense and courtesy, you would probably silently acknowledge that there is someone who is currently in a far worse situation than you, and that your need to exit your driveway is less important than the right of a fellow human being to live.
You might even spot an emergency vehicle that is parked on double yellow lines, whilst its crew grabs something to eat.
What should you do if you witness this? Should you take a picture, and send the picture into an anti-emergency services ‘news’ paper ?
Of course not.
You should consider that if an emergency call came out, and interrupted the break being rightly had by the occupants of the emergency vehicle, then the fact that they only have to run for a few seconds to get back to their vehicle, rather than run for a few minutes, could be the difference between life-and-death for someone in need.
COMMENT
The mind boggles as to just what goes through the mind of someone who thinks that dialling 999 to complain about an emergency ambulance being parked across their drive is the right thing to do.
Do they (the caller) think that the ambulance crew are just sitting down and having a cuppa with Aunty Doris?
Do they somehow expect the Medics to stop what they are doing (saving someone’s life) and move their emergency ambulance so that the individual who has been inconvenienced can make that urgent trip to Marks & Spencer to buy some more Percy Pigs?
It seems that the elusive ‘common sense’ that has abandoned the sides of so many people, is becoming rarer than a beef steak at a slaughterhouse.
Written by one of the many Admins of Emergency Services Humour on Facebook, who is also a regular contributor to our popular satirical ‘newsletter’ that is emailed to subscribers once every two weeks.
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