Ambulance Service...
Friday
IF YOU suffered an injury in days gone by, help was just a quick phone call away. The ambulance would arrive, blue lights fl ashing and sirens blaring, within a few minutes of raising the alarm. But in today’s NHS, waits of two, three and four hours for paramedics to turn up are the norm. To highlight this shocking trend, I decide to go undercover once again.
Posing as a pervert who has suffered a painful accident when a sex game went wrong, I dress myself up in stockings and suspenders, sniff several amyl nitrite “poppers” and insert a battery-powered sex toy into myself. The part I am playing calls for me to push the dildo a little too far up so that I am unable to remove it. After struggling in great discomfort for a couple of hours, trying to tease the vibrator out with two spoons, the man I am pretending to be eventually decides to ring 999.
The first crack in the system shows itself the moment the operator answers my call. “Which service do you require - police, fire or ambulance?” she enquires. The idiocy of the question staggers me. Here I am, adopting the guise of a man with a sex toy lodged half way up his colon. What possible use would a copper be to me?
Armed with a truncheon, the only thing he could do would be to to push the thing even further up. And as for the fire brigade, admittedly my 10” anal intruder is quite high up, but bringing a 40’ turntable ladder to tackle it would be overkill.
As soon as operators stop wasting valuable seconds by asking stupid questions, the better. “Ambulance,” I answer, play acting that my voice had gone all high with the pain. I proceed to give my address, and the ambulance arrives outside my house 3 minutes later. But in the state I am pretending to be in, it feels more like 3 hours. And a 3 hours response time for a supposedly mod- ern emergency service simply isn’t good enough.
The paramedics come and and fall for my ruse hook, line and sinker, not for a moment suspecting that I am actually an undercover reporter rather than a sex pervert with a dildo stuck up my arse. As they assess the problem with a portable endoscope, they feign sympathy, telling me not to be embarrassed as they see all sorts in their job.
But when one of them goes out to the ambulance to fetch a speculum and a pair of longnosed forceps, I imagine he is having a really good laugh at my expense, hardly the professional attitude I am entitled to expect from a highly paid healthcare worker.
When he comes back in, he has managed to hide his smile and replace it with an expression of practised concern. To be fair to the paramedics, the procedure to remove the sex toy from up my bottom is quicker and slightly less painful than it was on the three other occasions when I have gone undercover using the same story.
But overall my experience at the hands of the ambulance service leaves me deeply troubled. In an area of patient care where every second counts, both response times and staff attitude have left much to be desired.
The frontline of the NHS will have to up its game by a considerable margin if it wants to survive in the twenty-first century health marketplace.