A matter of life and death for paramedics

FORMER pub landlady Jenny Young is not happy.

As an experienced paramedic, she listened to the debate in Parliament where the region’s MPs took turns to discuss the anecdotal evidence of the ambulance service’s ‘failures’.

The mother-of-one takes particular exception at the suggestion the service is ageist and does not care about elderly people who need an ambulance after a fall.

Ms Young, who lives in Durham and works at Lanchester Road Hospital, on the outskirts of the city, says: “We are aware that we arrive for people who have waited a long time for an ambulance, but nobody would ever expect you to prioritise a patient with a broken bone, whatever their age, over a patient in cardiac arrest, and that is what we are talking about.

“We are talking about crews that are attending life-threatening jobs where we need to be there to make sure that patient survives.”

Days after the meeting, the case of a 91-year-old, suffering from osteoporosis, who was left lying in a street for two-and-a-half hours, was reported in The Northern Echo.

The pensioner was injured and bleeding from her mouth and elbow.

Cases like this were highlighted by MPs from across the North-East at the debate in London earlier this month.

Ms Young, who is a registered paramedic but now works as an emergency care clinical manager, said: “It is not something we, as crews, are happy about. We do worry about it.

“We are aware of and we apologise because it is all we can do.

“Ideally, we would want to be with them as quickly as possible as well, but to stand up in Parliament and discuss limited cases about elderly people, I felt there was very much a suggestion that we are ageist and we prioritise elderly falls further down the line than anybody else and that is just not the case.”

The meeting heard the service attended 68 per cent of the highest priority calls within eight minutes between March 2015 and February 2016, missing the target of 75 per cent.

‘Red one’ calls are described as ‘life threatening situations’, such as a patient in cardiac arrest, while ‘red two’ calls are ‘potentially life-threatening’, such as a stroke or heart attack.

It was the second year running the service has failed to hit the 75 per cent target in both cases.

There has, however, been an increase in the volume of ‘red’ incidents the service has to attend, up by 19 per cent from August 2015 to January 2016.

Ms Young says: “I felt quite disappointed and quite angry at the end of the debate. They have not represented the service fairly.

“It was not very balanced. We do a lot of good things and we do them very well.

“We have an amazing dedicated group of staff and while the MPs acknowledged the work we do it was always followed with a ‘but’. That does not make the crews feel good.

“The ‘but’ is not acceptable. We work hard for long hours and our crews are extremely dedicated.

“Nobody wants to go to a patient who has been waiting for hours in pain, or is unhappy with the amount of time they have been waiting for an ambulance.”

The service has a total of 470 paramedics, 142 ambulances as well as 57 rapid response vehicles

It covers 3,200 square miles and serves a population of 2.7m people in rural areas as well as built up towns and cities.

Last year, there were 101,404 emergency 999 calls in the County Durham and Darlington area alone.

Ms Young says: “When you get a job where you are travelling to an elderly person who has fallen and a Red 2 job comes in where someone is in cardiac arrest and is having a heart attack, or there is a sick or choking child, or a not breathing child, those jobs have to take priority and we have to go to those jobs first.

“None of the people who were mentioned in the debate would be happy knowing that our crew had been sent there when there was a potentially a life-threatening case that we were not looking after.

“A lot of the elderly people that we go and see would fully understand that.”