NIGHT ON THE COAST FRONTLINE
AS the rain pounds the highway and sirens blare out into the cool Gold Coast night, a man is hiding after having his head cracked open by a sharp rock.
It’s early, just past 6.30pm, the first job of Queensland Ambulance Service operation supervisor Gavin Fuller’s 12-hour shift and it’s a violent one.
The Bulletin was onboard with Mr Fuller last Friday to get a behind-the-scenes look at what paramedics are confronted with on a daily basis. We’re on the move down the M1, heading to the Mudgeeraba Holiday Village. A man has allegedly broken into a home before he is confronted by the occupants. We get on scene and police have control. They are searching for the victim, several ambulances are there. It’s a waiting game, such a violent incident requires police to be in control. Until they can find the victim and the offenders, they hold back. Eventually, the man is found. No-one is talking, but he has deep cuts to his head, hit with a heavy, sharp object. He’s taken by ambulance to hospital. He’ll need stitches and to be observed to make sure he doesn’t have an underlying brain injury. Gavin explains the need to wait until police have secured the scene. Paramedic safety is paramount.
“If our paramedics go into a job and they believe the scene is unsafe or there is a threat to themselves by anyone – and it may not necessarily be the patient, it might be a family member or a bystander – then our crews will retreat to the vehicle and lock themselves in and, if it’s still unsafe, they’ll leave the scene,” Mr Fuller said.
“That’s where we rely a lot on the operation centre and the call takers to try and gather as much information about that job as they can.
“The OP centre has an ability to liaise directly with the Queensland Police.
“They can tell us if they’ve had any previous issues at that address with aggression, firearms, or if there’s any flags on that resident.
“Sometimes they may advise us to stay and wait for the QPS to get there first or they will send a car to back us up, which is what happened on that first job.
“These are the jobs that our team, the operations group, would go to. One of the supervisors would go along to ensure the safety of our crew. It brings another set of eyes to watch over the scene and make sure nothing changes.”
It’s barely an hour into the shift, but for Gavin this is a normal nightshift on the Coast, probably even a little bit quiet.
“The Gold Coast is probably one of the busiest places that I’ve worked in. When you look at what we take into the two hospitals here on the Coast, they are quite often the busiest hospitals in Queensland.
“And that’s compared to the big Queensland hospitals, like The Royal Brisbane and the PA.
“Friday night was very quiet, normally it would be double or triple the workload in a night and that’s just me, that’s not the other crews as well.”
The wet roads are playing havoc around the Gold Coast; the next two jobs we go to over the space of a few hours are car crashes.
At the first, three people are extremely lucky to not have rolled down an embankment, their car spinning out and hitting a tree in Pacific Pines. A young woman is taken to hospital with minor injuries.
“It was wet and slippery, for a young inexperienced person in that sort of rain … they lost control and hit a tree,” Gavin said. “They were three young kids that were very, very lucky, because the damage to that vehicle was quite significant.
“It could have ended up a lot worse.”
The next is two young female drivers who are lucky to have not been swept down a river after driving into a flooded road in Bonogin.
Their car is dangling over the side of the road as they manage to get out and walk to safety, through water that’s about a metre deep.
“The young girls had come around the corner and down the hill and I think because they were young and inexperienced, they were caught off guard and next thing they know they hit that water.
“They were lucky, that car was caught up on the edge of the bridge and they were able to get out of the car and walk out. If that had been a little bit deeper, mixed with how fast that water was going, it could have been a lot worse.”
WHEN YOU LOOK AT WHAT WE TAKE INTO THE TWO HOSPITALS ON THE COAST, THEY ARE OFTEN THE BUSIEST IN QUEENSLAND GAVIN FULLER, QAS
It’s a steady night, the rain has kept a lot of people at home, but the last job we go to is something more and more paramedics and police are being confronted with. A person allegedly under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
A young man is under the influence of some substance and is involved in a scuffle. He has a seizure and ambulances rush to the Upper Coomera home.
His case is mild, the young man is more upset with himself and hasn’t lashed out at the paramedics, unlike others who become highly erratic.
“Alcohol and drugs certainly play a big part in a lot of the jobs we go to. If you could tick three boxes, it would be alcohol, drugs and mental health. They would be the three biggest workload jobs we go to.”
As the night dwindles out and the rain keeps hitting the ground, talk turns to the future of being a paramedic. The upskilling of ambulance officers on the ground has got to the point where they are now able to perform the same tasks as those in an emergency department resuscitation room.
“The skills that your advance care paramedics have on road now and you combine them with the critical care paramedic and the highacuity paramedic, that is the same treatment that’s provided in a resuscitation room in an emergency department in a hospital.
“When that team all get together and start working on a patient, it’s like a mobile emergency room, there on the side of the road.
“It’s gone from the days where you’d pull up in an ambulance, put someone on a stretcher and drive them to hospital to now it’s virtually a mobile resuscitation room.
“It’s absolutely saving lives. We have drugs that can break up clots that are causing heart attacks. We have other guys who carry blood. They can start giving people blood on the side of the road. These are things that only used to be ever done in a hospital. They’re now being done on the side of the road.”