Sometimes a profound truth can be found hiding in a piece of trivia. I thought this recently reading surely one of the silliest stories of the media's annual silly season.
It concerned a 999 call made by a member of the public in the Midlands requesting an ambulance. What life-threatening injury had she suffered? Well none. The 32-year-old woman merely wanted a lift home. She had spent the day shopping ‘and now my feet are hurting me so much that I can't walk—they're burning,’ she explained to an admirably—if inexplicably—patient operator. ‘I've got two miles to walk home and I'm not going to make it in this condition.’ The story went viral after NHS staff began to Tweet about it with the hashtag #notataxiservice.
The released tape of the conversation is oddly compelling as the sore-footed shopper responds with increasing indignance to being told that an ambulance would only be able to convey her to a hospital. While it lacks the surreal edge of a similar story from last summer (also incidentally from the Midlands) when a caller summoned an ambulance for a pigeon ‘because he looks unwell’, it perhaps better illustrates an enduring problem—a lack of respect for the work of paramedics among a section of the public.
This is often capable of taking a more frightening turn. In the same week, a case in Northern Ireland revealed how an injured man threatened and spat at paramedics, and caused criminal damage to the inside of an ambulance and a defibrillator as they rushed him to hospital. Meanwhile the South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAmb) floated possible plans to use police-style body-cams, CCTV and conflict resolution to curb assaults on paramedics which have almost doubled in the past 5 years.
The problem has grown to such a magnitude that the health service trade union Unison has called for a Government taskforce to look into how to keep NHS staff safe in their jobs, and urged that the public takes some responsibility for the volatile and sometimes dangerous environments that paramedics find themselves working in. ‘It's not just about things like CCTV,’ said a Unison spokesperson. ‘It's about educating people to let them know the impact that these incidents have on people who are working to protect them.’
It is an issue that the Government should ignore at its peril. Much is made of the potential brain drain of junior doctors from the NHS, but all too little attention is paid to the shockingly low levels of morale reported by paramedics. Work stress and levels of pay, which do not reflect the increasingly sophisticated evolution of the profession, are said to be behind an exodus of 1000 paramedics a year from the NHS. The resulting financial cost is high, with some ambulance trusts paying out £30 an hour for agency staff—double the NHS basic rate. Sure the modern NHS should aspire to provide properly resourced seven-day care, but it should also be focussed on something just as important – the critical first five minutes of frontline care provided by paramedics. Certainly #notataxiservice, and #nottobetakenforgranted either.