It has been a very sad few weeks in the ambulance service. Three paramedics from the East England service have taken their lives, in the space of 11 days. Another paramedic committed suicide from South East Costal and one more attempted but got found. This is the reality of the awful situation that the NHS is in. Yet, it is being kept incredibly quiet at the moment.
I have looked up to paramedics for a long time, my dad became one when my sister was born, twenty-four years ago. Whilst I was in hospital, my brother went into the profession and I have many friends in the service too. I have seen firsthand, the pressure that they are under to meet targets, and how that has increased dramatically.
From the news reports about some of the accidents that my brother has had to attend, I know that the ambulance service are real life heroes. Yet to my horror, the statistics of hate crimes against ambulance staff has risen extensively. On average, six paramedics are severely obstructed by the public every week. Yet still, when the call comes, they are ready to come and save a stranger’s life.
Some of the calls that my dad went on, still haunt him today. From children being run over, to big road traffic accidents and everything in between. Paramedics carry around memories from the past. If you were an everyday person who went through drama after drama, people would ask how you were coping. They would expect you to keel over with stress and need support. Why is it any different for paramedics? It is not normal to plough through drama after drama without stopping to assess how you were feeling. Yet, we expect ambulance staff to go from job to job, emergency after emergency, with a clear head. It is physically impossible to take on this amount of stress. They could finish at one horrific job, and then get called to another, as soon as they leave the call.
The question is: has it always been this stressful? The service is running into the ground. Ambulance 999 calls increased by a massive 7% between the month of December 2017 and January 2018. That is a huge increase, but there are no extra staff to take on the responsibilities. In fact, there are more people leaving the profession. It is impossible to maintain this kind of stress. When my dad had been on the frontline, he had got a few calls a night. He would be able to sleep until the red phone rang and he was called to an emergency. The shift would start by sorting out the ambulance to check that everything was there, slowly easing into the shift. Now, paramedics barely get a moment to sit down on a night shift. They are thrown from job to job and everything has been made about meeting targets.
This is where the problem lies, because we aren’t just targets. Paramedics are human, like everyone else. They need a moment to be able to eat food, have a drink and go to the loo. At the moment, they eat on the job, barely getting half an hour to themselves on a long shift. If there is an emergency, they can’t just choose to wait ten minutes so they can eat some food and mentally be ready to think quickly and save lives. Their job is to be there to save the day. The public don’t really think about them needing to have a moment of time out. We expect them to get a call and come running. That is what they are trained for.
The calls that paramedics are now sent to, is frankly ridiculous. My dad blames the use of mobile phones for the increase in calls. He explained that before, people would have to run down the road to find a phone. They would only do that in an emergency. Whereas now, it is easy to just call an ambulance on your mobile. As technology has got faster, we expect everything else to speed up.
Why did it take half an hour for an ambulance to get to a call that should have been answered in 8 minutes? Because the load is simply too much. There aren’t enough ambulances to take on the influx in calls. It is simply not possible. I have waited for four hours for an ambulance to come and assess me. They had been on their way to me for three and a half hours, but as they moved from the other side of Kent to get to me, they were called on medical emergency after medical emergency that had to be dealt with first. Everything has to be prioritised. What happens if they don’t get to the job in time? It wasn’t like a normal job, where you would receive a short email if you failed to reach a target. In a paramedics job, people die if you don’t get there on time.
The jobs we send paramedics to, go from being frankly laughable, to then real life emergencies. How do you change your headspace from one minute dealing with someone who called an ambulance because they had a cut on their hand, to speeding down the motorway to a road traffic accident, where people have lost limbs?
In my years of being unwell, there have been many occasions where I have needed to be taken into hospital. The life threatening situations that I faced, when I was uncontrollably convulsing, had been dealt with such professionalism. The paramedics who came to my rescue, saved my life. They put tubes into me to maintain my airway, they worked on me for an hour, making sure that they had done everything they could to stop the seizure. I cannot thank them enough for saving my life. Without them, I wouldn’t have made it and most definitely wouldn’t be sitting here today, in the middle of the night, watching my daughter sleep. They gave me back my life, by saving me that day.
We expect paramedics to be there when we need them. All of us have the potential to need an ambulance to be called to us. You never know what is around the corner, so in times like this when the stress levels of the job are reaching fever pitch, we need to be looking after them, as they look after us.
The ambulance service (and subsequently the NHS) has tried to take steps to look after the wellbeing of their staff better. There is now a mental health officer, who is there to look after the staff. There is counselling made available for paramedics and they are running a program called TRIM. It is a peer led support system to support paramedics who are at risk of a psychological effects, from a traumatic job. It needs more, but could we as the public do more to help the morale of the NHS? Junior-doctor-turned-comedian, Adam Kay, has written two books showing how important it is to just say thank you for the help. Something as easy as that could change somebody’s day. We can make a difference.
Anyone in the health profession doesn’t choose that vocation because they want loads of money, they do it because they want to help other people. When student paramedics are training, do we need to think about making sure they are psychologically assessed first? Is it ok to not assess their wellbeing? I don’t think it is. We hope that when the call comes, an ambulance will be speeding on it’s way to help us. In order for that to continue, we need to think of the people behind the targets. People must respect the ambulance service, and not call them out simply for a lift into hospital. 111 must be able to provide assistance, that doesn’t always require them sending an ambulance out for a nosebleed (yes that really does happen). More funding must be put into the service. Because illness doesn’t just effect the poor, it will take on anybody, and it is when you are in a life threatening situation that you will call an ambulance and on having to wait for a vast number of hours, wish that the NHS had been saved.
*Since writing this blog, another paramedic has sadly committed suicide at the beginning of this year.