Tom Reynolds's Blog, page 3

The Bitch Is Dead

The mosquito is dead, killed by chemical warfare. The only side effect being my new understanding that spraying insecticide into your eyes tends to sting a little.

Loads of good ideas in the comments although I am somewhat disappointed that no-one suggested this...

It brings a warm fuzzy glow to me - and a desire to see a similar, but larger, system strapped to the top of my ambulance for destroying the tyres of drivers who pull out on me while I'm driving on blue lig...

Mozzie

2:00 AM

....

2:30 AM

...

3:00 AM

...

3:30 AM

...

4:00 AM

...

4:30 AM

...

Every thirty minutes.

Every. Damn. Night.

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I've not been sleeping well, in fact I've hardly been sleeping at all. The best I can manage is a half doze before the bitch wakes me up.

For the past few nights there has been a mosquito in my flat. Every half hour she has been buzz bombing my face, looking to land in order to suck my blood.

Try as I might I can't catch her.

So every half hour I slam on the bedside lamp, grab my glasses...

Knickers

It's never a good sign when your patient has her knickers around her knees.

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'Woman in Labour - outside newsagent shop'.

So far, so boring - another maternataxi job, walk on walk off, baby arrives a few hours after the end of our shift. No sweat.

My crewmate is driving, blue lights to do a job of a taxi, when a minicab swerves across the road and pulls in front of us.

"Oi! Can't you see the lights!?", shouts my crewmate - we are used to the crazy drivers of Newham (especially the minicab...

Blokes With Bandages 4 - Role Models

Role Models

In the final part of my series of whinging, moaning and general grumpiness I'd like to look at the one thing that road staff truely have no-one to blame except themselves.

Where are our role models?

It took Mary Seacole, Florence Nightingale and others like them to start to drag nursing up from it's roots as a 'Doctor's Handmaiden' into a profession of it's own.

Likewise you have Sir Robert Peel and his effect on policing, Elizabeth Fry and her prison reforms and countless scientists ...

Blokes With Bandages 3 - Continuing Training

Continuing training

Medicine and the paramedical sciences are constantly developing, there is new research and new products that we need to learn about. We also need to refresh skills that we might not have used in some time. For example, I don't believe many babies, other crews deliver loads. I don't have many calls that could be classed as 'trauma' other crews are 'trauma magnets'. Meanwhile there are crews that perhaps don't have the same number of 'social care' issues that I do.

So it is...

Blokes With Bandages 2 - Training

There are two important parts of training, that of the initial training that you have to do and the other being the continual development, refreshment and assessment of our skills that should be constant through our career.

Initial Training

The LAS is a place where you never quite know the skill level of the person that you find yourself at the scene of an accident with. In part this is due to the varied training programmes that you have in order to be employed by the service.

For instance, I...

Blokes With Bandages

On this blog I've often moaned about things that the government does that makes our job more difficult, less effective and worse for patients. A large part of this being the clinically irrelevant Orcon target of reaching a large number of our patients within eight minutes.

This target chasing has led to what I consider to be a number of very bad decisions from our upper management which has resulted in low staff morale.

However, I've endlessly banged on about these problems and I'm yet to see a...

Removing Intubation

As I was reading my Twitter feed before my shift started I noticed something. Loads of my fellow London Ambulance people were talking about intubation. I had no idea why.

It only took me a while to hear the rumour, then manage to get back onto station, then find on the internal website the bulletin that they were all talking about.

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Since the start of Paramedic training, one of the things that has been a main thrust of their qualification is the skill of intubation. Intubation is the...

Chronicles of EMS

What do you mean you aren't watching 'Chronicles of EMS'?

It's a show about EMS, and it's by EMS people and it is really rather splendid.

And now there is a competition! For they are very close to being picked up by 'proper' TV.

(I'd enter but I haven't had an original thought in years... Also I don't like flying and I already have an iPad)

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So here is the big news!

We need your help.

Over the past few months our esteemed creator/director/producer and all round good guy, Mr Thaddeous Setla...

Wakeup

For the past four or five months I have been coasting at work. It's not really my fault, it's just that none of my patients have been... challenging.

I've been going to a seemingly endless supply of patients who either do not need an ambulance because their 'illness' is so minor, or have had such simple problems that helping them doesn't require much in the way of thought.

I haven't had to 'blue light' a patient into hospital for this period.

And so I find myself settling into a fug of relaxed '...