Saving someone’s life, being threatened with a knife or delivering a baby – not most people’s average day at work. But then, a paramedic’s work is anything but average, as benhealth’s James Simpson found out first hand.
I recently learned what it takes to do a job where you could be the one responsible for saving someone’s life when I spent a day out on the road with the West Midlands Ambulance Service.
West Midlands is the third largest ambulance service in the country, serving 5.3 million people from Staffordshire in the north to Herefordshire in the south. It has 1,258 paramedics, out of 2,181 frontline medical staff dealing with over 1,700 incidents a day.
I met my guide for the day, Mark Jevons, at Russell Hall Hospital, in Dudley. Mark’s 30 and has 10 years’ experience as a paramedic. That was as far as the conversation got before we started scything through the morning traffic on our way to the first job of the day.
We arrive at a school for children with severe and profound learning difficulties. An 11 year-old boy with cerebral palsy was having an asthma attack. Mark assessed the situation immediately; the child’s oxygen levels were dangerously low at less than 80 per cent. Although Mark was unable to use medication, due to the child having an allergy, he used his skills to stabilise him.
Mark works out of a one-man fast response car, rather than a two-man ambulance, because sometimes by using one-man crews the service can better direct resources quickly and effectively. In this incident it was immediately clear an ambulance was needed. He called it in and an ambulance took the boy to hospital for further treatment.
We’re back in the car and Mark tells me he first became interested in the profession after attending a school careers exhibition.
He says: “I got involved with the ambulance people on the day and then researched more into it when I left school. I saw a job advert in the local paper, applied and after waiting I managed to get an interview and passed through the training to become a technician and eventually a paramedic.
“I’ve been with West Midlands Ambulance Service all my working life and I really enjoy what I do, patient care and actually making a difference makes it a very rewarding job.”
The alarm is raised again, and before we can make it back to base, we’re on our way to see a 38 year-old woman with breathing problems.
We arrive at the house to find that the woman is having an anxiety attack. This time Mark uses his counselling skills to calm her and help her to regulate her breathing.
He tells me in this job you see a lot of different people and situations. Sometimes when he’s been called out to help someone people can get confrontational. Mark says: “I’ve had a chair thrown at me, been pinned up against a wall by a man suffering a severe diabetic attack and once a psychiatric patient threatened me with a knife.”
As I watch Mark in action I see someone who cares and really enjoys making a difference to people. And when I hear him talking about incidents like these, where it is not just the patients that are stressed but the people who are with them and called 999 in the first place, I start to understand that it takes a certain type of person to become and stay a paramedic.
Mark continues to tell me about the highs and lows of life as a paramedic. He says: “Jobs with injured or seriously ill kids involved always hit home. I particularly remember one incident where a boy had climbed over a spiked fence and slipped onto the spikes. We tried to save him, but he died.”
“I’ve delivered my fair share of babies which is always nice, but had to deal with a stillbirth once, which was tough.
“I will always remember getting called out to my granddad. My mind was completely on the job, and in some ways it was comforting that I was there and did all I could to try and resuscitate him, but he died.”
We’re back at base for a cup of tea, but then the next call comes in. This time it’s a 68 year-old man with chest pain.
As I burn my tongue trying to get at least one sip of tea into my mouth, Mark sees me and laughs, “you throw a lot of tea away in this job,” he shouts.
We’re at the man’s house and he appears to be ok, but says he’s been having chest pain throughout the morning. His wife called 999 because she was worried. Mark runs an electrocardiogram (ECG) test that measures the electrical activity of the heart and shows any problems with its rhythm. He also runs various checks including blood pressure, oxygen levels, blood sugar levels and checks for signs of a heart murmur.
An ambulance crew arrives a few seconds later, as the nature of the 999 call could easily mean a life-threatening situation.
Mark relays his information from the tests and we leave while the ambulance takes the man to hospital for more tests.
I ask Mark if he gets annoyed when people call 999 and it turns out that their condition isn’t urgent or life-threatening.
“Sometimes people just don’t know what they should do, and it is a case of public education, but if you are unsure how ill someone is you should call 999,” He says: “It is always nicer for me to tell someone that they are ok, rather than they are not looking too good.”
I leave Mark just before the end of his shift as he is called out to one more job. It might seem a lonely existence in Mark’s role as a single-crewed first responder paramedic. But he meets different people every day, he saves lives and he sees first-hand the immediate difference he can make to someone’s life.
This article first appeared in issue 10 of benhealth, the magazine for Benenden Healthcare members.
