Tuesday 24th October 2018

This morning we caught the underground to London Ambulance Service, we were met by Chris Doyle who isa flight paramedic and staff officer to the director of operations. Chris had prepared a presentation for us, outlining the organisation including the amount of staff and jobs they do every year. It was quite overwhelming to see the amount of calls they take, jobs they attend and amount of patients they convey to hospitals. Due to the nature of their organisation they have the ability to use alternative care pathways using their hear and treat process. When a low acuity call comes in, they decide what pathway is most appropriate for that patient. The operations centre can deploy a push bike to attend and they can potentially discharge that patient to a their GP, a taxi or an ambulance if the emergency department is required. We met up with one or the push bike riders, he was an Australian who works as a first responder generally to cat3 calls but as of today they were going to respond to cat2 as well. The bike weighs about 80kg and contains everything that an ambulance would, with the exception of a 12 lead ECG (which they are in the process of adding).

We were lucky enough to walk through their operations centre, which was absolutely amazing. It was a two tiered room which was double the size of our state operations centre. The call takers are in on the main floor and the dispatchers, clinical support and managers are located on the upper tier. They work slightly differently to our operations centre in that they do whole shifts on dispatch or call taking. They had multiple dispatchers for the regions in London. There are multiple clinical support roles in the room, including paramedics and a nurse. One of the paramedics was in charge of deploying the HEMS, he calls the scene to assess the patient again. I found it quite interesting that he still uses the initial ProQA questions to begin his call;

“Tell me exactly what’s happened?”

“Are they conscious?”

“Are they breathing?”

“Are you with them now?”

He then freelanced his questions after this point. I think this could be beneficial for our clinical support paramedics in the operation centre using a standardised approach. This would also ensure that if anything has changed, those critical questions are asked again. I will ensure I follow up with Chris Doyle to find out the rationale behind this process and if there is any research to show that this is an effective form of communication during a call back.

Chris explained all the processes for any mass casualty incident and discussed some of the more recent incidents that have occurred in London. I felt very lucky to be living and working in Perth.

i was meant to be heading out of shift with one of their ambulance paramedic practitioners but unfortunately a few crews got caught up with a job. Chris and i  went to 2 emergency departments (both very small) for to meet a few EMTs and Paramedics. It has been great to chat with Chris as he is so knowledgeable and experienced.

So today was actually my birthday and the team were absolutely amazing to me. They began the morning by giving me a some beautiful gifts, all in which signified things that I love. Those being; galaxy, orange chocolate, magnets, crabs and a few other gifts in there that really started my morning on such a high.

Without any warning or expectation, the crew surprised me with a cake. Now this was just not a regular cake, this was a cake with my favourite photo of all time on it. For those who have read the previous blog posts you would’be “met” old mate. Little did he know that he would make doesn’t and centre of my 29tb birthday cake. I have had such an amazing day, completely spoilt and full of knew knowledge and information.

As you can see, I got to eat old mates face. We went out to dinner for my birthday and the team found a restaurant that had chicken on the menu (I love chicken). To our dismay, while trying to order we found out they had run out of chicken.

Chris was lucky enough to head out with LAS the next day for a morning and he got to get a few snaps of one of their HEMS.