Don’t block my drive!
Neighbour leaves angry note – as paramedics fight to save dying man
An ambulance crew were left an angry note about their parking – as they battled to save a dying man’s life.
Paramedics were stunned to find a message had been attached to their ambulance saying: ‘Don’t block my drive’.
They had been no longer than 30 minutes in a cramped through-road dealing with a patient who had collapsed with suspected internal bleeding.
But as they returned to the vehicle, onlookers noticed a note had been left on their windscreen that read: ‘You may be saving lives but don’t park your van in a stupid place and block my drive.’
Tasha Starkey, one of the crew on the 999 call in Birmingham on Friday, later posted a picture of the note and by last night it had received almost 2,000 reactions on Facebook. She wrote on Twitter: ‘Crew alerted an extremely poorly patient to hospital... minimal on scene time, arrived at hospital to find this note... this patient was TIME-CRITICAL.’
A spokesman for West Midlands Ambulance Service added: ‘Sometimes we just don’t know quite what to say. Our staff will always try and park considerately, but sometimes there just isn’t time.’
The following day, another crew was treating a heart attack victim when somebody banged on the side of the ambulance because they couldn’t get their car out.
In Friday’s emergency, paramedics were called to the Small Heath area of Birmingham because of a man in a critical condition.
He was vomiting blood in the ambulance as he was being taken to hospital. It emerged last night that he had died. The 42-year-old was a resident of Livingstone House, a rehabilitation centre for drug and alcohol addicts, when he suffered what is thought to be an unrelated medical episode. John Hagans, a nurse consultant at the unit, said the charity had been ‘disgusted’ by the note.
He added: ‘Words fail me. This person deserves to be shamed.
‘If the person who wrote it had had any idea of what was going on inside [the unit] they would not have dared. His condition was so severe they could not move the ambulance for half an hour because they were fighting so hard to save him.’
Another driver was blocked in for more than 40 minutes but ‘respectfully sat in the car and waited’ he added.
Residents said parking was a major problem on the street. Anamaria Dunne said of the ambulance: ‘There was nowhere else it could go.’ West Midlands Ambulance Service used the hashtag # patientscomefirst on its social media posts.