Today was a more relaxed day at work, because the main exam was yesterday.
We did 3 tests on the PC, but they were easy because there were 20 questions with a pass mark of 80%, but you could do them again and again until you got 100%. I did two of them more than once, but eventually I got 100% all 3 times, so I look a lot smarter than I actually am!
The rest of the day was spent either upstairs in the EDC (Emergency Dispatch Centre, where the 999 calls are received) or in the town centre for lunch. I had fish and chips from a decent shop we found, nice and healthy!
I listened to several calls when I was in the EDC, some interesting and some not quite so. We got 3 or 4 calls for elderly people who had fallen and could not get up, including one from a couple of district nurses who had been to visit an elderly man and found him on the floor in a confused state. He told them he'd 'tripped over the dog', despite the fact that there wasn't a dog on the property!
Next up was an ASHICE (age, sex, [medical] history, injuries, consciousness and ETA) from an ambulance crew who were transporting a very unstable elderly gentleman to hospital. I could hear sirens in the background, so if they were transporting him on 'blues and twos' he must have been in a bad way.
A 27 year old male was up next, it was a 4th party call (the caller was in an entirely different part of the town to the patient, and didn't know him personally) from a crisis team to say that the patient had taken 7 days worth of antidepressants.
The most interesting, and potentially tragic, call we received came from a woman whose husband was having a tonic-clonic (aka grand-mal) epileptic fit, which is the most serious and life-threatening one there is. He was watching TV on the sofa when he suddenly started having a seizure. Naturally, she panicked and was near-hysterical when she got through to us. The call-taker I was observing used the techniques we're taught to calm her down, which started to work until she was told to go through to the sitting room and check if the gentleman was still breathing. When she came back, she was experiencing a 're-freak' event, which means that the seriousness of the situation hits her, so she got very distressed again. The lady's husband stopped fitting so we told her to drag him off the sofa and onto the floor, so his airway could be maintained. We stayed on the line with her, until eventually the ambulance arrived. Hopefully he'll make a full recovery.
So there you go, two hours spent with one call taker on a Friday afternoon - what's a Saturday night going to be like?!
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5 comments:
ASHICE - Is that like a blue call? Do they come through on the 9's from the crews? Do you have to put them through to the hospital or are they just for your own records?
Good start to the blog - look forward to reading it once you get going properly!
Hey, Welcome to the world of the NHS Ambulance Service. Nice to see a new blog, obvioulsy remember to keep it broad, you dont wanna get in trouble for it! Take Care!!
A LAS EMD
From what I learnt on that call, ASHICE is basically where the ambulance crews phone us with the essential information about a critically ill patient. We can then let the receiving hospital know and they can get the right staff and equipment ready. I'm not sure if they do it on the 9's usually, I'd have thought they radio through to the hospital themselves, but this one was taken by a call taker.
In the LAS, the crew do it on the radio and then the radio op or a dispatcher phone it through to the hosp!! Our crews would never get through on the 9's in time!!!!
ASHICE sound like pre-alerting then, I have just completed my training as an EMD although I only do call taking. Glad to hear you have passed your tests and will keep on reading your blog.
Good luck with your future in the Ambulance service.
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