I recently gained a promotion from planning non-emergency ambulance routes to controlling the running of patient movements on the day. Essentially, this means I’m now the man with the plan - I tell crews where to go, what to do and when to do it. I don’t deal with emergencies, but we do move everything that isn’t an emergency - day care patients, admissions, discharges, outpatients, dialysis patients, radiotherapy patients, transfer between hospitals and much more. This means we have about five times more movements than the frontline emergencies.
There are two Operations Controllers for the whole county of Berkshire. Would you like to know how my first day in my new position as Operations Controller for the Royal Berkshire Ambulance Service went? Here’s how it went: it was a living nightmare.
I got in at 7.30am, an hour before I was due to start, in order to be prepared and organise myself. I found that forty percent of my staff were either off sick or on annual leave. Two of my High Dependancy vehicles are off the road which means I only have two vehicles that can take stretcher and high-dependency patients. That’s two, for the entire county of Berkshire. All the rest of the vehicles are dedicated to moving day care centre patients, dialysis patients, radiotherapy patients, people who aren’t emergencies but still need transport.
There was a bed crisis at all the major hospitals in Berkshire. What does that mean? It means there are no beds for patients. They’re full. There are patients sleeping in trolleys in corridors. It also means they all try to offload their patients onto each other. And we have to move them. Except I didn’t have any vehicles or crew and I still had all of my regular patients and outpatient movements to do, not forgetting all those patients who had been planned but had to go back in my “not yet moved” screen because they weren’t ready when the goddamn vehicle turned up.
And then several London hospitals closed down due to an outbreak of vomiting and diarrhea sickness. So frontline are going beserk and are unable to move emergency patients and have a backlog of 999 calls. They had to call in all on-duty staff, the Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance. I had to free up what vehicles I had to move only priority patients who couldn’t just get in a taxi - people who need stretchers or must travel in a wheelchair or simply can’t get in a car. I must’ve ordered 50 taxis for everyone else.
There’s been very heavy rainfall recently, which is now turning to ice. Many of the major roads are flooded. A large number of our High Dependency movements are between Slough and Reading. There’s only one road between these two major towns that isn’t flooded and it’s the motorway. You can imagine the traffic.
I had hospitals ringing me demanding to know why everyone was so late, why their patients hadn’t arrived or been picked up yet. I had families of patients calling to ask me what time their wife/mum/dad would be home (and god only knows how they got my number, which is a crew line). I explained again and again what the pressure of work was like and people just got shitty with me. I don’t want to keep people waiting in hospitals to go home. I’m human. I realise it’s awful for them to have to sit in a waiting room for two or three hours. I’m trying my goddamn best.
I took two breaks today: one to wolf down a salad in five minutes, one to hide in the bathroom and cry because I was so stressed. There are so many things I couldn’t possibly control that went wrong today. But it was also my first day in this position. After being so nervous that I would fuck up, I felt like I’d failed horribly. While I’m sitting in that chair, moving those patients is my responsibilty. And I didn’t have the resources to know what to do. A more experienced person would’ve coped better than I did. I’m not a more experienced person and I tried my best with what I had, but I didn’t have much. My boss was in a meeting and although she was very supportive and backed me up when she finally came to assist me, it was too little too late. When I left after working for twelve hours there were still patients waiting to be moved.
I hope tomorrow is a better day.
