Real drama that will make your HEART RACE

It’s siren-screaming, edge-of-seat viewing as Inside The Ambulance follows actual paramedics at work

Excellent medical training is, of course, essential for the paramedics of the West Midlands Ambulance Service. But they also need lots of patience – and a sense of humour.

Over the course of a 12-hour shift these front-line responders deal with sick children and the frail elderly, violent drug addicts and time wasters with a cough. As we see on reality series

Inside The Ambulance, it’s their ability to keep smiling that carries them through.

The West Midlands Ambulance Service is one of the busiest in the country, handling 3,000 call-outs a day. Inside The Ambulance, now in its third series, delivers a rollercoaster ride of emotions, where you empathise with those in pain – physically and mentally – and cross your fingers that those who are seriously ill survive.

‘It takes a special kind of person to be a paramedic and it’s a privilege to join their team,’ says Audrey Neil, the series producer. ‘You need to be resilient and compassionate, and you need to be able to deal with anything.’

The show’s intimacy comes from its myriad of cameras – on the paramedics’ bodies and in their ambulance. It all feels terribly real because it is; and there are more stories in each episode than in a whole month of Casualty. Among the stories we see this series are an elderly man who’s fallen over at his birthday party and a toddler who has drunk liquid air freshener.

The paramedics are also called to treat a two-year-old boy who has had a seizure. When they arrive he’s out cold and his mother is worried about his breathing; it’s not the first time he’s had a fit and doctors haven’t discovered why. But when the ambulance staff prick his arm to test his blood sugar he awakes abruptly and is quickly back to his adorably cheeky self, to the huge relief of his mother.

The team also clearly admire the older people they look after and when one 94-year-old has a nasty fall after slipping from his bed they get him back on his feet and are delighted when he is soon zipping around on a Zimmer frame.

Each of the heart-stopping moments in the show is followed by a heart-warming one; whether it’s the paramedics sharing a joke or the smile of a mother when she knows her baby will be all right. ‘Every day I’m learning,’ says Hannah Meredith, who has featured in all three series of the show and has been a paramedic for seven years. ‘There are some brilliant times, such as when you bring someone back after they’ve stopped breathing. But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t moments when I’d thought about quitting. It can be frustrating.’

Echoing the social care crisis we hear about but rarely see, Hannah estimates up to 60 per cent of her time is spent helping older people. Increasingly she and her colleagues are assisting with mental health cases. In one heartrending episode Hannah attends the home of a young woman who wants to kill herself – she had no one else she felt she could turn to.

For paramedics the most difficult thing isn’t the people who swear at them or even try to hit them but the time wasters – the people who call an ambulance rather than go to the GP. ‘Like the rest of the NHS, the ambulance service is massively stretched,’ says Hannah, who says she now sees up to nine patients a shift compared to four or five when she first started. ‘A couple of days ago I didn’t take a single person to hospital during my shift; people called us because they had a cold or a pain in their leg.’

But the show has already made a difference in terms of changing how people use the ambulance service, she says. ‘Sometimes people recognise me and say, “I can’t believe how many people waste your time”, and when we’re on a call-out a lot of them apologise and say, “I hope this isn’t wasting your time.” I can only assume it’s making people think twice. Hopefully the show could even take a bit of pressure off us.’

‘It has more stories than a month of Casualty’

Inside The Ambulance starts on Monday at 8pm on W channel, available on Sky and Virgin.

Paramedic Hannah Meredith