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When minutes can mean the difference between life-and-death, then taking up parking spots which are designated for emergency vehicles is a dangerous game to play!
Most of us often hear about the silly notes and messages which are left for members of the emergency services on their windscreens when they park their emergency vehicles before rushing off to save someones life…
In fact, we have covered this strange phenomenon quite a bit over the last few months.
Mainly in the hope that people will start to understand that when you are responding to a life-or-death 999 call, then the last thing you are worried about is where to park your vehicle!
You would think (and hope) that most people would just see this as common sense.
No-one would expect, for example, an ambulance to spend 10-20 minutes hunting for a spot to park whilst some poor bugger is fighting for their life.
And we all know what would happen to the crew if they did actually spend some time looking for a space to park, only to then arrive at the patients address to find that they were too late.
So you can understand the frustration currently being felt by Medics up-and-down the country.
So when a Medic based in Yorkshire saw a private vehicle that was parked in a designated ambulance standby bay, they shared the image on social media in order to try and persuade people not to park in these specially designed spots.
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It makes sense to have standby points such as this when you consider that a large volume of calls for help are made from popular public areas such as high streets.
Ask anyone who has had their life saved by a Medic, and they will tell you that minutes, even seconds, can make the difference between life and death; and thats no exaggeration.
But for some reason, people have started to criticise the medic who posted the picture. IN a post shared on Facebook, Ms Preece stated:
“The public keep leaving us notes on our vehicles and and taking photos criticising our parking so I thought I’d share this motorist that had parked in our ambulance city centre standby bay. The bay is clearly marked as for ambulances only but this motorist seems to think that doesn’t apply to them. This isn’t the first time this has happened.
There’s been some concern raised that I shouldn’t have put this onto social media. The way I see it is that we have a car parked illegally that is preventing the service having access to their standby point in their service vehicles.
They are parked in a public place and in a public place the public can take photographs. The same as when I’m working out in the public eye I cannot stop photos being taken of me and being shared online due to being out in public. I don’t see how it’s any different the other way around?
This space is not at a hospital so nobody was “desperately rushing someone inside”. If there is a genuine emergency then you call the emergency services. If you are disabled you use the disabled spaces. You don’t use the ambulance bay.
I haven’t been abusive or made any personal attacks on anyone and I did not wait for the driver to return in order to enter into an argument with them. Nor did I block them in or block the road or anything of that nature.
I think it would be really sad if the service were to take issue with me rather than the actions of this Honda. Especially following the rising abuse the all of the services have faced regarding the parking of our emergency vehicles whilst responding to emergency calls. The increasing disrespect shown towards my profession off a small amount of individuals troubles me, but I seek to educate rather than rant about it.”
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It poses the question as to why anyone would have an issue with a Medic sharing a post that is essentially designed to educate people as to the dangers associated with parking in bays which are specifically intended as ‘standby’ spots for members of the emergency services?
Surely we should be supporting any material that is shared for the purpose of helping the public to understand not only how the emergency services work, but also why doing things such as parking in ambulance standby bays could potentially endanger someones life?
It might have been that the driver of the vehicle that was featured in the post genuinely did not comprehend that owing to the fact that they had taken up the standby space, then doing so could potentially put someones life at risk?
Our emergency services are not robots – they have a right to express themselves in a professional manner? Which is exactly what this medic did when she shared the post.
Lets hope that Yorkshire Ambulance Service do not try and drag their medic over the coals for just sharing a post that highlighted to the public as to why they should not park in designated standby bays!
We’ll keep you posted!
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