We left elderly patients lying on the floor for nine hours
The job of my dreams slowly became a souldestroying daily torture. I went to work every day desperate to help people, and instead I was forced to leave them in limbo, waiting hours for emergency aid that was endlessly delayed.
As a 999 call handler for South Central Ambulance Service, serving more than four million people from Oxfordshire to the South Coast, I was often the first voice that patients would hear when they dialled.
I’d reassure them and go through a menu of questions to discover what their emergency was and how urgently they needed help. Often I would talk them through vital first aid. But the good I was doing seemed to be undone all too frequently by the chaotic conditions that are reducing the NHS emergency service to helpless inefficiency.
I saw elderly patients left without aid for up to nine hours, unable to move after a fall. We were reassuring them that help was on the way – but what we weren’t telling them was that it might still be hours away.
I saw patients repeatedly being bounced to the back of the queue, as new calls with a higher priority came in. And I watched in helpless frustration as more than a dozen ambulances were backed up in a hospital car park, because there were no beds to accommodate the patients.
In the end, the job I once loved drove me to stress-related illness and depression. And I was not alone: at least one colleague with another ambulance service committed suicide. AS a fully qualified emergency Medical Technician, working from the back of ambulances, I’d spent 20 years living in America before I returned to my home town of Bicester, near Oxford, in 2013. When I took a job in the 999 call centre, I thought I’d found my ideal employment – I was born to work for the NHS but, in my mid 40s, I no longer wanted to be the ‘first attender’ at accident scenes.
here was a way to use my skills. But increasingly, I felt I was being asked to do my job with my hands tied. The sense of disillusionment came from management policies which prevented me from dispatching an ambulance swiftly to people who clearly needed one. Other callers who knew the right responses were able to play the system, and had to be seen right away. That made me angry: there is a management rulebook, which dictates certain symptoms requiring a face-to-face assessment must be given priority.
All my experience was useless in those cases, because I had to follow rigid protocol. Common sense went out of the window. But the shift officers had the final say. As long as cases didn’t seem urgent, they could be put on hold. In practice, that often meant the elderly patients, who had suffered a fall and were lying on the floor all alone.
My own mother is 82. I hate the thought that if she falls, she might wait anything up to nine hours for help after mak- ing an ‘ emergency’ call. But that’s the reality, and it’s only getting worse.
Inevitably, when people are left for such a long time, their condition can deteriorate. When that happens, the ambulance service could be held liable – and the shift officers are quick to hush it up, moving to stop junior staff from discussing the case among themselves.
I took one call from a woman whose elderly husband had fallen in the bathroom. She had rung 999 almost an hour earlier, and was distressed that help hadn’t arrived. The injury had not seemed serious, but as I listened to her complaints I realised her husband did not appear to be breathing. I told the woman what steps she had to take to stand any chance of saving him, and handed the call over to a senior manager.
Later, I saw the case had been locked down on our computer screens, so that we could not access the details. It wasn’t a cover-up, but the information was suddenly available on a strictly need-to-know basis, and I never learned whether the man had survived.
every day, managers were telling us that we would not have any ambulances for nonurgent cases for five or six hours, though of course we couldn’t say this explicitly to callers. And even for serious emergencies, the resources were simply not available. The highest level of priority is the Red Response, for patients whose lives are in immediate peril. Our target was to get an ambulance there within eight minutes. In reality, too often, it could take up to an hour. That’s a shocking delay. And it is only one aspect of the crisis.
One day in December last year we had 19 ambulances queuing to unload at Queen Alexandra hospital in Portsmouth, and no one there available to cope with the intake. That’s a double bottleneck, because 19 patients were not being treated, and 19 more were waiting for ambulances.
Sometimes the solutions were farcical, with managers ordering a taxi to collect someone and take them to A&e.
In the 18 months I worked for the ambulance service, I cannot remember a day when we met all our targets.
With so many impossible demands call centres could become thoroughly unpleasant environments. Bullying was systematic, with managers venting their stress on staff.
The bullying, frustration and sense of helplessness took their toll and I was diagnosed with bleeding stomach ulcers brought on by stress. The job was killing me.
I can see the problems within the ambulance service, but I don’t know how to fix them. Sometimes it seems to me like riding a bicycle with your clothes on fire... but the wheels are on fire too, and even the road is burning. What part of the crisis do we tackle first?