My First Live Call

Yesterday morning at 7.53am, I took my first live call. You can tell it was important, because I noted down the exact minute of the call!!


I set off from home at 5.30am, absolutely bricking it, and I realised - the person who will be at the end of the line doesn't even know that they're going to be dialling 999 yet, let alone having me answer the phone! Poor thing.


I sat down with my trainer at 7am, so that I could listen to her take some calls before I took one myself. We got 3: an elderly gentleman who fell over in the kitchen, a police call to a custody suite where an 18yom had decided to fall unconscious in the back of a police van when he was arrested, and a single-vehicle RTC.
Anyway, onto my call! As soon as I heard the beep in my ear and I started saying "Ambulance emergency..." a young woman shrieked down the phone that her little boy needed an ambulance. She sounded very distressed, so I was unable to get control of the call by using repetitive persistance. I couldn't even get the location of the emergency! She gabbled into the phone, and then decided that she'd drive the kid to A&E herself and hung up. I phoned back, and it was answered by a man, sounding equally as upset as the woman, who confirmed that they didn't want an ambulance. That was a bit of a strange first call, so my trainer let me take another one.
This was an easier call, because it was from the receptionist of a GP surgery, who was calling to report that a baby was fitting. I got the initial information down (chief complaint etc.), and started to go through my questions. This is where she started to get upset, because she didn't know the answers. The baby's mother had just brought him in from the street, so they weren't even patients at the surgery. I explained that I had to ask the questions to keep the computer happy, and ended up just putting 'unknown' as most of the answers. I thought the call went quite well, because I managed to calm the caller down, and hopefully the baby was just having febrile convulsions (where the baby gets too hot and has a fit, it's quite normal, but worrying if you don't know what's happening).

One of the other people on my course had a nightmare first live call - she had to talk someone through CPR! She did very, very well and we all gave her a round of applause when she came in, because our trainer explained what had happened. We found out today that the crew were really impressed with the effective chest compressions and thought the patient stood a good chance of survival, so they continued CPR until they got to the hospital. Unfortunately he died overnight, but at least his family got to say goodbye.

Roll on Monday night, I'm let loose on the public!! :-D