Patient dies but managers still call it a success

WHEN I joined the service, it really was all about saving lives.

We got the calls through, jumped into our vehicles and set off to the job.

We were hardly aware of the managers but there wasn’t much paperwork to do and no obsession with meaningless time targets.

It was about patients, about giving them the best chance to survive in emergency situations.

Sometimes it’s a simple matter of getting them on a drip or giving them oxygen, or lifting them in a way that avoids further damage and then getting them to hospital fast.

At other times, it’s your experience that really counts, like spotting that someone who is listless has meningitis and taking appropriate action.

There are immense highs when things go well and obviously some real lows when we can’t make the difference.

I remember attending at the death of a child and how devastated we all were when we had to admit defeat. Everyone in the control room was crying as well.

I’d love to see a return to my early days in the job, with enough staff and enough vehicles on the roads to do our jobs effectively, and everyone pulling together.

Now, if the control room gets a 999 red call, the highest level, the ambulance has to be at the scene in eight minutes.

I remember one crew taking almost 12 minutes to get to a horrendous scene in difficult driving conditions, but doing an outstanding job and saving the life of someone who would have died without that instant treatment.

Control room staff classed it as a failure and managers wanted to know why it had taken so long to get there.

I know they class it as a success if an ambulance reaches the scene after seven minutes but the patient dies.

If you’re working on a patient who dies, you’re devastated – but the management consider it success if you meet the time target. What kind of logic is that?

The service, like other parts of the NHS, has become top heavy with managers and bureaucrats, penpushers who complicate our lives with increasingly meaningless paperwork and inflict pressure to meet their targets.

More staff are off sick long-term as a result, leaving colleagues even more short-staffed and making it inevitable that fewer vehicles can be put on the road.

We need the Government and the service to stop playing political games with our work, to end the target culture and the cutbacks that define the service.

We need them to value us, to invest in and train more people and to have more vehicles on the road so that we can do what we joined up to do: save lives in emergencies.