Control and Dispatch

Did a 12 hour shift in Control yesterday and absolutely loved it. I turned up at 7 as arranged and sat for an hour or two watching the dispatcher, listeniung in to 999 calls and her conversations with ambulance crews. Just after 9 she turned to me and asked if I wanted to do the talking whilst she watched over me. This went well till 11 when I went on a break. After that I cam back and sat again on the dispatch desk, plugged myself in and was pretty much left to my own devices with the Control Manager watching over me. At the end of the shift I hadn't dropped any huge bollocks and the stats looked good. It was really interesting to move resource round the East of the county to cover for incidents as they happened, esp[ecially as we had no cover in Christchurch for 3 hours due to an incident at the Priory. Keeping the rest of the county covered whilst ensuring that went smoothly was a challenge. The control staff were quite impressed and asked me if I wanted a job. I'm kenn to have another string to my bow so now they are arranging for me to get the training so that I can take overtime shifts as a dispatcher.

Last Thursday was either the shift from hell or the shift from heaven depending on your point of view. From an experience point of view it was heaven sent. From the patients point of view it would have been hell. I was just finishing a batch of four days after a quick turnaround from three night shifts. I had also just worked three overtime night shifts over the Christmas Bank Holidays so I was a little tired as you can imagine.
First call was to an 11 year old seizing, no history of epilepsy but he was diabetic. BM was 3.2, GCS 11 so he was blued in to hospital for review.
Second call was to a 14 year old unresponsive. He was at the bottom of the stairs, GCS 9, pyrexic, 2 day history of illness. He got blued in to A&E where he was RSI'ed in resus and then admitted to ITU. Further tests showed he was suffering from meningitis.
Third call was to a 76 year old male Chest Pain. On arrival I found him sweaty and grey with 10/10 central chest pain, no radial pulse. Cardiac stents had recently been fitted. ECG showed massive ST segment elevation so we blued him in to the nearest A&E. They took one look at him and arranged for us to immediately blue light transfer him to the nearest PCI centre. We did this and watched the angioplasty which was very interesting.
Fourth call was to a collapse ? cause. Found an elderly gentleman unresponsive on the floor. After 20 minutes of CPR with 3 rounds of Adrenaline we called him.

What a day!