Welcome to my personal site
Presumably you have arrived here because you know me, have met me recently, or have been given a flyer with my website address on at one of my talks.
This is my personal site which I keep updated with information about my books and the associated press coverage, and the talks I do for the uncut project. The site is usually updated on a Friday, with extra news as and when it happens.
Katie the Paramedic Book Signing
Thanks to everyone who came along to the book signing at the Whitgift Centre in Croydon. It was lovely to meet you all, and I hope you enjoy reading the book. I have updated the gallery page with some pictures from the event.
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Pretty Pills by draconianrain on Flickr
Early in my shift I was sent to a young man who was complaining of feeling faint. When I arrived at the grotty estate I took a glance at the seedy block of flats with its boarded-up windows and was rather wary about going in. I called up our control room and asked if they would ring me back to check I was ok in a few minutes. I needn’t have worried though, because no sooner had I hung up than the young man himself appeared from the main entrance and walked over to me.
He looked pale – very pale – so I sat him in the back seat of the car with the door open and fetched some equipment from the boot. As I was beginning to take his blood pressure I asked him what the problem was. He told me that he had been at a party the night before and taken Ketamine; he had no bad feelings during the night but when he woke up a short while ago he felt terrible and called for help. As he spoke to me he started to look really dreadful; he began sweating profusely and then passed out completely.
So now I had an unconscious young man half in and half out of the back of my car! I laid him back and swung his legs and feet up onto the top of the door frame to help restore his blood pressure, then I quickly called control for backup and put some oxygen on him. Luckily I managed to get a cannula in to a large vein in his arm and ran in a bag of fluid.
The ambulance arrived promptly and the young man was just coming round as they pulled up. He still had a very low blood pressure so we transferred him on to the trolley bed and elevated the foot of the bed. He was blue lighted to the nearest hospital and once we handed over to the staff he recovered well enough for us to begin chatting with him. He told us that the last time he took Ketamine it gave him serious heart trouble and he ended up in hospital! It begged the question – why on earth did he do it again then? Sheepishly he promised this was the last time…
Posted in NHS, Paramedic.
Tagged with Ambulance, collapse, drugs, illness.
Photo courtesy Jon Yates on Flickr
In response to requests from their commissioners, London Ambulance Service NHS Trust (LAS) has decided that they will no longer employ Emergency Care Practitioners (ECPs) as part of their workforce.
Existing ECPs will be transitioned into suitable alternative employment, with the hope that they will contribute their varied skills in their new roles.
Reflecting on this, I was reminded about a talk I gave at NHS Live in 2004 when ECPs were very new. I spoke in a couple of ‘workshops’ with Professor Sir George Alberti about the benefits of Emergency Care Practitioners to the patient and to the NHS.
Sir George was the NHS Tzar for Emergency Care at the time and we did a joint presentation about new developments in emergency care. In particular I gave a case study presentation that illustrated the difference it could make to the patient if an ECP arrived to look after them rather than the traditionally double-crewed ambulance.
I decided to use the case of an elderly lady with a cut to her lower leg who I had been to previously. In this situation an ambulance would normally have conveyed her to hospital for treatment but I described how, as an ECP, I would be able examine and treat her in the home and save her a trip to hospital.
It was a huge event with medical and nursing representatives attending from all over the country; I was really very nervous. Carol Smilie was hosting and Tony Blair was a keynote speaker; no pressure there then! However, it went quite well despite my nerves and lots of people approached me afterwards interested to know more.
The National Archives has a snapshot of the emergency care bulletin that was released at the time. Have any thoughts about this change in workforce configuration? Be sure to leave me a comment.
Posted in NHS, News, Paramedic.
Tagged with Department of Health, NHS Commissioning, Professor Sir George Alberti, Trends, wider NHS, Workforce Development.
Green Bottle Fly, by laserstars, on Flickr
In the evening of one of the beautiful warm days that we have had lately (which also happened to be my birthday!) I had an observer called Jenny out in the car with me.
We were called to a ‘collapse behind locked doors’. This is quite a common call for us. Sometimes a concerned relative has tried to get in touch by phone from a distance and on getting no reply immediately contacts the emergency services. On these occasions the home is often empty while the occupant is out shopping or having a lovely lunch with friends!
Other times a friend, carer or neighbour has real reason to be worried because they can see or hear the occupant through the letterbox or a window, collapsed on the floor. Sometimes we try to climb in a window if there is one open, more often we call the police to kick in the door for us.
On this occasion sadly, having just returned from their holiday, it was the bad smell that alerted neighbours that something was amiss. Before we even got inside the flat, the terrible smell told us all we needed to know and through the curtains large numbers of flies confirmed our belief.
The police arrived with an ‘enforcer’ to break in the door and I discovered he corpse of the elderly man in a bedroom. He had clearly been there some time and would now have been unrecognisable to his family. The flies, maggots and their pupa were concentrated in the room with him. The presence of pupa suggests that he had lay there at least 1-2 weeks.
As there was nothing more that we could do for him, I completed the paperwork and we left the police attempting to make contact with the man’s family to break the news.
Although it appeared that he had simply died a natural death in old age; to us it was very sad that his family hadn’t seemed to care enough to notice his passing.
Posted in NHS, Paramedic.
Tagged with collapse, illness, observer, Paramedic.
