TEN HOURS IN AN AMBULANCE

A long day of lonely journeys

‘It’s not just patients who are afraid’

David Hall is on the frontline as an ambulance paramedic, writes Maeve Sheehan. Photos by Mark Condren

THE loneliness of the coronavirus patient is what most strikes David Hall. On their journey through this cruelly isolating disease, Covid-19 patients travel solo. There are no family members seeing them off when he collects them in his ambulance, none travelling in the back on their way to hospital and no one to receive them when at the end of the journey. “That’s what hits you most,” he says. “Often you are the first human contact they’ll have

had, save the nursing staff in the hospital.”

One journey with an older Covid-19 patient was particularly poignant. “We had collected the gentleman in the ambulance from a hospital,” he says. He had lost his mobile phone charger, but he had an older model of phone, so a replacement was not easily found.

“It was like his arm had been cut off. He had no contact and no means of contacting his family. We eventually found a spare charger in the base and gave it to him. We later heard back that he was on the phone all night.” Hall is in his second week back on the frontline as a paramedic, transporting patients with Covid-19 from homes to hospitals, from homes to test centres, test centres to hospitals, hospital to home and hospital to hospital. “We are probably doing an average of five calls a day,” he says.

He is better known as the campaigner who set up a service for people in mortgage arrears, or the man sent in by the Health Service Executive to clean up the suicide bereavement charity, Console. A paramedic by training, he also owns the private ambulance service Lifeline, which he started with his wife, a nurse.

When the coronavirus took hold in Ireland, Hall re-registered himself as an ambulance paramedic and went through several rigorous training days before going back on the road two weeks ago. His company — and other private ambulance services — have offered a fleet of ambulances, emergency medical technicians and paramedics at cost price to the HSE.

“We’re in a crisis, a pandemic, and additional resources are required for people getting sick,” he said. “There’s an element of complement here, where it is not fair or appropriate for me to expect my own staff to step up and not be willing to step up myself.”

Hall’s 10-hour shift kicks off at 10am at the ambulance base in Leixlip and the calls start early.

The work is tougher than he thought it would be but calmer than he had expected, given the coronavirus.

The ambulance has to be aired and cleaned after each Covid-19 run, which adds 45 minutes to the turnaround time. “The first thing you do is leave all the doors open in the ambulance for 20 minutes to allow any Covid-19 particles that are in there in the atmosphere to settle. Then you put on your PPE gear, and you’re in there, stuck into a strict deep-cleaning regime of the entire interior of the ambulance. We use crystal disinfectant. Then everything is discarded into a yellow decontaminant bag and binned.”

An undercurrent of fear ebbs and flows throughout his working day.

“It’s not just patients who are afraid, everyone is afraid,” he says. “We’re looking at Covid-19 every day and we know the impact it can have. You don’t want to get it, you don’t want your family to get it, and you don’t want your colleagues to get it.”

Two staff have been infected in his own company, and he says dozens of ambulance crew with the Dublin Fire Brigade and the HSE are off work. Hall has spent €45,000 in the last month to buy PPE — “100 here and 100 there” — full body suits with the high grade, N95 face masks.

“The expectation going forward is that there are going to be a lot more patients and a lot more PPE required,” he says.

The unexpected upside of the crisis is the new-found unity between the disparate elements of the frontline health service.

But he believes he and other private ambulance providers could be doing more for the cause.

At the moment, his services are primarily used by hospitals. But, he points out that there are 445 full-time private ambulance personel in the private sector that could be deployed to nursing homes,” he says.

Hall — a natural talker — compensates for his off-putting PPE gear by trying to “knock out a bit of craic” with patients on journeys — “unless they tell you to shut up”.

“Today I was told by a patient that my PPE gear looked ‘very snug”’ on me,” he says.

“It’s strange — people are sick, but they like the banter. Most people want normality to go on, they don’t want anyone to treat them any differently or in any negative way because of Covid-19. They know the effect on them of the virus and their purpose in life is to try and stay well and come out the far side of it. So you are sort of trying to give them hope, in any way you can.”