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Delco dispatch 42418 media ambulance3/11/2024 ![]() ![]() They were fed up with the situation, and with the stress that is part and parcel of our jobs. Why did they quit? Because they couldn’t achieve the set response times and were in effect set up to fail – and fail the very people they set out to help – on a daily basis. In the space of two days recently, no fewer than six colleagues handed in their resignations. ![]() Every week in the service I work in, someone – either experienced or more junior – leaves. They may feel worthless and, in their hour of need, like no one cares.ĭelays affect ambulance staff, too. But there is also an impact on that person’s mental and emotional health. Delays may mean the person needs more treatment and has to stay in hospital for longer. Slow responses can have an impact on physical symptoms, such as someone lying there with a broken hip, or losing blood from a wound or going into respiratory arrest. Individuals join the ambulance service thinking they’re going to be able to reach casualties with life-threatening problems, but are frustrated and demoralised to learn that too often the casualty has almost certainly suffered further while waiting – and they’re often greeted by a barrage of abuse from an anxious family member, even though the crew have done their utmost to get to the person quickly. We have a situation where the public has unrealistic expectations – that the service has no hope of meeting – about how fast an ambulance can reach someone.ĭelayed response times have a human cost, both to ambulance crews and patients. The number of calls has increased massively – and the system just can’t cope with the call volume, and can’t reach patients in time. So many staff are leaving that ambulance services can’t train new staff quickly enough to replace them. Why are ambulance response times in so many parts of England so bad? Can we blame it all on Covid? Or is it perhaps a more chronic problem, because the ambulance service hasn’t employed or retained enough staff? In my view, it’s clearly the latter. She had a fractured hip and mild hypothermia and she couldn’t move, which was degrading for her – all thanks to an ambulance service that really doesn’t care about its patients. However, by the time we arrived she had spent six hours lying outside in the rain, unable to move. It was classed as a category C call, requiring an ambulance to get to her within two hours, because the nature of her injuries was unknown. I recently attended an incident in which a woman had fallen over. In more than 20 years working in NHS ambulance services as a paramedic, I have never seen response times to 999 calls as bad as they are now.
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