First nominee hiked miles in freezing cold to save climber
Henrietta Marriott is a life-saver in rural Scotland and our first nurse to be nominated in our People’s Choice category.
An advanced nurse practitioner at Invergordon Community Hospital at weekends, she is also a Basics (British Association for Immediate Care Scotland) responder supporting the Scottish Ambulance Service.
The 57-year-old, from Golspie in Sutherland, is part of a Scotland-wide network of highly-trained professionals – doctors, advanced nurses and paramedic practitioners – who volunteer to attend 999 calls in remote and rural areas where ambulances may not be immediately available.
Her patients can include seriously injured and dying road accident victims, cardiac arrests, major falls, and potentially fatal sepsis.
One call-out from Basics was to an injured hillwalker trapped and injured on the Sutherland hills. The temperature was barely above zero and the casualty was unable to move, with hypothermia a serious risk for him and his two climbing friends.
“My husband Patrick and
I drove to the area with two Basics emergency rucksacks, we worked out the location with guidance from ambulance control, and then walked two miles up the hill with the rucksacks on our backs,” said Marriott. “The nearest mountain rescue team was an hour and a half away. After assessing and treating the patient on the remote hillside, with backup all the way from ambulance control and senior clinicians by phone, evacuation was organised with the wonderful help and ingenuity of a local farmer.”
Other call-outs also involve car and motorbike accidents on the North Coast 500 route.
“While they may include major multiple trauma involving helicopters and road ambulances, like other Basics responders, you can be first on the scene and work with the back-up of physicians until ambulance crews arrive,” she added. “The challenge is to do the very best possible for each patient by going into automatic pilot with the first-class training.
“You stick to the structure. The tried and tested process. Even if the patient does not survive, you know you have done your best.
“However, that does not stop you reassessing everything, to check if you did everything humanly possible to keep them alive.”
Marriott insists that she is only doing what thousands of other nurses do every day: “Many nurses go above and beyond the call of duty because that is our vocation.
“What I do is nothing out of the ordinary in comparison to the many thousands of nurses across the country, working day in, day out in our healthcare system.”