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Aylesbury ambulance chaser - a night in the life of a paramedic
It is hard to grasp just how much trouble alcohol causes in society without talking to the people who mop up the after effects.
In the one night that The Bucks Herald spent with paramedic Adam Broom and Kev Proctor, emergency care assistant, we picked one girl up from an alley behind Mendoza's, one who had started choking in her sleep in Stoke Mandeville and a man who said he drank 10 pints before crashing his car into a ditch.
These three cases accounted for about half of our 12-hour shift. The first call out was to the man who needed rescuing from a ditch.
Police surveying the scene said that he was lucky not to have gone through a hedge and flipped his car.
The ambulance crew said that their job is not to judge the man for possibly drink driving but to patch him up and take him to hospital.
At the scene there were three people from South Central Ambulance Service, two police officers and an off-duty doctor who just happened to be passing.
In the hospital, no fewer than 14 doctors and nurses were pulled from what they were doing to check him over and now police and the courts will go through the process of seeing whether or not he should be prosecuted.
The cost to the taxpayer is huge.
More unnecessary expense came from the girls who were picked up by the ambulance and taken to A&E until they sobered up, or as one nurse put it: "If you can walk to the toilet you can walk to a taxi, you can go home."
The same nurse told us that we were allowed to bring one drunk person back to casualty, but less than an hour later we had another for them to deal with.
One 'emergency' had been on her first night out since she had a baby seven months earlier.
Her friends thought her drink had been spiked, but after some persuasion one said: "We were all drinking champagne, we (four people) shared a couple of bottles, but she doesn't like champagne so she had a bottle of ros to herself."
It seemed a totally alien concept that her tolerance levels might have dropped somewhat since she last went out drinking.
Looking after drunk people is not only expensive to society.
Our emergency teams are fed up with them clogging up the system which begs the question: Why become a paramedic?
The answer came at 4.15am on the Sunday morning when we were called to Chesham.
A woman had given birth to a boy just 25 minutes earlier.
There was no emergency but the birthing doctor said she wanted him to go in for observations so we were called to go and fetch the new bundle of life.
Adam said that this was the reason he did his job – to make a difference to those who need it – not become a blue light taxi for drunk people.
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Weather for Aylesbury
Friday 25 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 11 C to 24 C
Wind Speed: 21 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 11 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 20 mph
Wind direction: East
