Inevitably, following an incident of unprecedented scale and severity, there are going to be lessons learned. The West Cumbria shootings on 2 June 2010 is no exception, which saw Derrick Bird shoot 12 people dead, and himself.
One of the main recommendations following a 4-week inquest referred to communication between the police and ambulance service. There was clearly a level of confusion and a lack of communication at strategic level. Ambulance chiefs were unable to get through to their police counterparts to find out if the scenes were safe to enter and whether police escorts were available. Worryingly, Cumbria Constabulary knew nothing of the health and safety protocol regarding ambulance staff. The police airway system almost collapsed and the police and ambulance service used different wavelengths on their radios, so they had problems communicating. There does, as a result, need to be greater co-operation between police and ambulance staff during an incident of this severity.
One of the most contentious issues raised during the inquest has been that ambulance crews were ordered to stay away from the shooting scenes. There were delays of up to two hours for injured victims to receive paramedic care. The current policy is for staff not to enter the scene of a shooting until it is declared safe. Refusal to adhere to this current protocol could have resulted in the local trust being prosecuted for corporate manslaughter.
David Roberts, West Cumbria coroner in charge of the inquest, has called for a change in the ambulance policy on safe points, with a recommendation that ambulance staff be allowed quicker access to the scene of a shooting (The Westmorland Gazette, 2011). According to the coroner, the current protocol that the ambulance service work to is ‘disturbing’, ‘unworkable from a practical level’, and emergency services should be prepared to ‘risk their lives’ to protect the public (Griffiths and McClounie, 2011). On the other hand, Peter Mulcahy, head of the North West Ambulance Service for Cumbria, has called it ‘wholly inappropriate and unreasonable’ to send unarmed and unprotected staff into an area where a gunman was on the loose (BBC News, 2011).
So should paramedics be held back in such incidents or should they be obliged to risk their lives as part of their job? Should they be criticised or disciplined for not entering a burning building, going into a raging river or violent bar fight to help victims? The health and safety of staff must remain at the forefront of this argument and we cannot expect ambulance staff to act as though they are completely dispensable.
Every year, there are thousands of attacks on paramedics and, as we all know, they are not armed or trained in public order. It is down to the individual on a day-to-day basis to decide if he/she is prepared to risk their own life.
We must remember that such a harrowing massacre is unprecedented and no matter how much we can attempt to plan for such an incident, nobody can predict the outcome. Each paramedic at the scene took a decision based on the information he/she had at that moment. In this case, health and safety protocol did dictate the decisions made. However, there is no suggestion that any more of the victims would have survived if paramedics were on site sooner.
Risks are taken by ambulance staff every day to help others, but it has to be a calculated risk. Sometimes it seems easy for people to forget that paramedics are also people with their own lives to consider. Rather than condemning the staff involved for ‘slowness’ or ‘inaction’, surely we must at least consider how ‘we’ would behave, or wish to act, in a similar situation where our own lives are at stake.