“Bravo for your recent post. I work for _________ (please anonymise me and the trust) as a Manager in control and over the Christmas and new year period we were asked to tell everyone generating a category 2 ambulance (as long as they had mental capacity) to make their own way.
We have accounts with all the major taxi services and we’re booking taxis for people as they were quicker than ambulances.
I know of 2 people who died making their own way and that’s just the ones I was involved in that I now have to prepare reports for as ______________
The average wait for a cat 2 was 2.5 hours (should be 7/8 minutes) and for a cat 3 was 8.5 hours (should be 20 minutes) on New Years Day we had over 130 outstanding emergency calls with no crew to send them.
One individuals family rang as she was asthmatic and FFB generating a cat2-no one to send-45 mins later they rang back saying she’d stopped breathing. She died.
Amongst all of this I also dealt with a regular caller who rang 999 50+ times in under 2 hours. We tried to get the police to attend but their waiting time was 2-4 hours as it wasn’t an emergency for them.
At the finish we booked her a taxi to take her to A&E even though she had no medical problems at all, simply because if she was sat in a&e she wouldn’t be dialling 999.
I have had several staff resign and 2 walk out in tears. Over 20% of our 111 calls were for people wanting prescriptions why can’t GP’s be reminding patients who get repeats to organise it BEFORE the holidays.
My call handlers all take 111 and 999 calls so if they’re answering one of the continuous ‘160+’ calls in the 111 queue they can’t be answering 999 calls.
We have 315 staff and even if every single one of them was working every single shift (impossible plus we don’t have enough desks) we still wouldn’t be able to have dealt with the volume of calls.
One woman rang on Christmas Day three times wanting a routine blood test and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t have it the same day???
One woman walked to an urgent care centre and didn’t like the 2 hour wait so walked home and rang 111 wanting a GP home visit claiming she was bedbound.
2 hrs was pretty darn good wait time as well bearing in mind ______ centres were at 6 hours plus! _______ hospital closed its doors completely between 7pm and 2am.
At one point a pen was diverted from _______ to _______, who then diverted her to __________ and then after 4 hours the crew were diverted back to ______ again once it reopened!”
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I don’t care whether this is in England, Australia or wherever in the world it is disgusting the way Ambos, Police , Firies and Emergency services are over worked, under paid and unappreciated in a lot of cases. They are abused, spat on and physically abused and they don’t get the back up from Governments that they should. Stop wasting time on overseas holidays and big pensions and help these services and the people that work for them.
I wish this was not replicated but this now time for NHS to admit failure across all areas and throughout the UK currently !
What more will take ?
Maybe a death within the Emergency Services which is not acceptable – this is 2018 !
It’s so sad reading this (mop) God only knows what it does to you frontline workers who give so much of yourselves to (way too many) us and get such crap back, it’s just so wrong that most services are having budget cuts but we still send billions abroad – mostly to countries who don’t need it and are laughing their backsides off, just wrong. From this mop who hasn’t needed to call any of you for many years – Thank you all for putting up with the twats. Huge respect.