Why are 999 call handlers like this?

[NotADailyMailJournalist]

Hello

I came across a man collapsed and bleeding heavily from a head wound in the street today. Literally a thick puddle of blood. I slammed a folded, fabric shopping bag on the wound to stem the bleeding.

Me: Hello, I've found a collapsed male, conscious but with heavy bleeding
Call Handler: what age is he? Do you know his name? Did you see him fall?
Me: 60-ish maybe, not sure on name, Davie he says, maybe, no I didn't see it happen. Is the ambulance on its way?
Call Handler: YOU NEED TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS, LISTEN TO ME! Further questions about when did this happen etc etc.
Me: he's very distressed, can I tell him the ambulance is coming?
Call Handler: FINALLY says ambulance is on way.

Speaking to friends, they say this is common. Why can't the call handler just say "it's ok, ambulance is on way, answer these questions in the meantime"?

Thanks

As maybe but surely when they are told the person is a stranger to you that the call handler actually understands you to know what bloody age they are or what bloody lottery numbers they but on. Maybe instead of blindly following what it says on the screen they use a bit of common sense.

They follow,a,script.
Despite what they've been told in a garbled first sentence it makes much more sense to go through that script in order. This ensures essential and useful information isn't missed.

These is research and experience that has gone into creating that script, and having questions in a certain order, etc.

I mean you can't really tell from a programme that's edited
People I worked with went on to be doctors, paramedics or moved into other jobs entirely
You don't need to be a graduate. I was and so were a lot of my colleagues though
If you want them all to be bright graduates then they'll have to be paid more

How rude are you?!

Maybe because they pay just over minimum wage, for 12 hour shifts, and the job is so stressful few people can handle it.

Plus, a degree in Maths isn’t particularly helpful when the main skill set is keeping calm under extreme pressure and resilience.

If you have watched Ambulance, which I doubt because it would never move me to make that comment, you’d know how emotionally battered they are, and how the majority of their time seems to be spent on mental health patients with nowhere else to turn. And a lot of those patients phone many times, daily sometimes.

I laughed at one:

"Are they on any medications?"
"I'll ask them" <goes off and returns> "They say they're on XXX".
"Are they conscious?"
"Well they're answering my questions!"

It's really frustrating, but nothing like as frustrating as being told "this line is busy, please hang up and try again later". That was well pre-covid, so can't blame that.
There is nothing like the helpless feeling you get when told to hang up on 999 because they can't take your call when you have someone unconscious who's probably had a stroke in front of you. At least if you get in a queue you feel that you'll get through at some point.

The questions don’t delay an ambulance. We didn’t click a button afterwards that says “send ambulance”. The ambulance if needed is being arranged in the background while the questions are happening. It’s all scripted and you cannot by pass, you might have given a part of information at the beginning, but they don’t need it until further down the questions and they have to ask at the time and then also Ask questions that might not seem relevant. But they are.

It’s shit, I liked the job but hated the lack of support - when your first cardiac arrest is your friends grandad and you know he’s dead before she does. So you have a little cry and ask for a minute but get told “no, you need to take the next call” in training - you realise the job isn’t for you. Everything is so rigid.

No need to be rude, but the pressure at the other end is immense. Hopefully it’s not like that all in trusts and hopefully 9 years later our trust is better!

I wish there wasn't such pressure to perform CPR. It usually doesn't work, and if it does, you don't just go back to normal afterwards. If I was close to death enough to require CPR, I wouldn't want it (although apparently they don't pay attention to that, e.g. if someone tells them the patient has a DNR, and will just try anyway, which is terrifying).

It’s worth acknowledging that it’s frustrating for a call handler to be repeatedly asked the same question they cannot answer: Are you sending an ambulance and when’s it coming? That’s the immediate thing nearly everyone asks.

Saying Stop please answer these questions is firmly taking control rather than aggressive.

Age of a stranger can usually be estimated so that can be answered more helpfully than “I don’t know, I was just on my way to Lidl and found him and he’s bleeding , I’ve put a fabric bag on it and oh my god are you sending an ambulance?

Taking a breath and answering questions as best you can is usually very helpful in calming a caller

Saying 'help is on its way' may well not be true so they can't exactly say that.

There are not usually ambulances sitting empty waiting around for a call.

Calls have to be graded and you can only do that by asking questions. The general public are not always good at calmly and clearly conveying key information or assessing seriousness. 'Someone's been stabbed' wouldn't necessarily require an immediate ambulance (i.e. often one diverted from a lower graded emergency), because it might be 'just' a paring knife in a hand.
And 'did you see him fall' is a useful question, if you had they may be able to determine if he tripped on a step, if it was a sudden collapse, if he was holding his chest as he collapsed etc. etc.

Is it just me, or do we seem to be living in times now where people no longer respect others’ professional opinion/knowledge? It seems like since Covid, so many people question the knowledge of professionals, often even qualified and experienced professionals!
I mean, I know it became almost a national sport to question the health experts during the pandemic but it seems to have continued and expanded to everything.

Maybe it is just me.

Police catching a murderer is more important than getting an ambulance out for a person you believe has been mortally wounded?

Maybe you should ask people to leave their fingerprints on a glass too?

Thankfully this is no longer true - about 80% of cardiac arrests get bystander CPR now, the call taker tells them how to do it, it is very straightforward.

I could never be an ambulance call handler. 111 is stressful as it is. You have to do 12 hr shifts for 999.

"Why can't the call handler just say "it's ok, ambulance is on way, answer these questions in the meantime"?"

Honestly? Because most of the time an ambulance won't be on its way, at least not any time soon. Have you missed the thousands of news paper articles about people waiting hours? A friend's dad was having a stroke and was told it would be 4-8hrs, that's the second highest category level (Amber1), which is a lights and sirens response! Someone conscious and bleeding will be below this. Even if they have an ambulance to send at the time it could very well be diverted before it gets to you if someone else is a higher priority.

I worked as one a few years ago. They are meant to let you know when someone has called an ambulance (they just shout across the room to someone who isn't on the phone) but yes, there's a script and they'd get into trouble for not adhering to it.

Because from name they can see if previous medical issues and grade ambulance.

YABU. They’re not going to be telling you the ambulance is coming until they know whether it is or not. A conscious patient with a head wound is not the highest priority and is likely to have a wait. They need to ask their questions so they can triage and prioritise the people waiting. Being repeatedly interrupted by someone asking if the ambulance is coming just makes a difficult job even harder.

Fair enough if you agree with the call-handler that dangerous debris on the road isn't important.

I guess there must be a lot of highways officials who don't agree with you, going on the number of times I've seen (very helpful) warnings on the dynamic motorway signs warning of exactly that.

It might also be, as PPs have said, a case of different people describing different things with similar words - although I did give her an indication of the size. Without bothering to listen for further clarification, a 'stone' could be a pebble, or even a standard house brick that people could easily drive over. The one that I reported would have had a similar effect for all but the highest vehicles to slamming into a wall at 70mph. I personally would consider that very dangerous indeed, but maybe I'm just old and boring, eh?

Doesn't surprise me in the slightest, we came across a car stopped in rush hour traffic, other drivers swerving round the blaring horns. The driver was having a heart attack, other drivers continued to blow horns and drive aggressively as those that had stopped to check what was going on tried to extricate him and carry him across the road for CPR.
Like if you come across a van and a car with hazards on then another with people on their phone, leaning onto the drivers seat then carrying someone out clearly something is very wrong beyond the 1 minute delay you have had trying to get around them!!
If I ring 999 in that case I know the ambulance is going to be sent out, it ll get there when it gets then, though every minute feels like ten so I know how awful the wait is

It sounds like it was a shock OP - understandably. It's not what you expect and you should be proud that you did what you needed to to help him. I think your anger is probably a way of dealing with that shock.

What I would recommend is to remember that ambulance questions are based on international research and are designed to save the most number of lives. The person in front of you is your highest priority, but the dispatcher has to pick from hundreds of calls every shift. I have a background in critical care and have attended many hundreds of cardiac arrests, including many that were sadly unsuccessful. The thing that kept me going was knowing that I was doing my best by following the evidence. If the patient died, I knew we had given them the best chance we could.

You did your best, but you have to allow the dispatcher to do theirs. I'm actually surprised that your first aid course didn't cover this. Do you remember learning the LIONEL acronym?

Do you think someone who has just told me they've murdered his mother is going to follow my instructions to do CPR? For a violent attack, it's far more important for the attending crew to have police arrive first, and the police will know from that information if the suspect is known, a mental health fantasist or other.

If you don't know what you're talking about, button it. You're part of what makes this job so damaging.

a minute reassuring you is a minute that they're not guiding you to potentially save someone's life

I think many of us get this - and we're not expecting them to have a little chit-chat about last night's episode of Coronation Street or asking how your Auntie Mabel is getting on in her new bungalow - but the point is that it's clear they often DO waste minutes in asking repeated and/or nonsensical questions.

If somebody calls and says they've just seen "an elderly man" (i.e. not their Grandad or Bill from next door) fall on a kerbstone, flat on the pavement, and he isn't responding to anybody talking to him, it's pointless asking for his name, his medical history, when he last saw his GP, whether he might be pregnant or whatever.

My daughter (20)(student in London) went on holiday for a month in summer and came back to find her flatmate dead on the loo. They had been there weeks in the heat and you can imagine the state. The 999 phone service were horrible, wanted her to touch the body, shouted at her when she wouldn’t despite her describing the scene. No compassion.The police came, early on looked at her holiday booking to ascertain where she was , put her in a room (not hers)took her phone, left her for 6 hours and then came and interrogated/ shouted at her at about two in the morning. Then told her she could not collect any belongings and asked her to leave the house. She said she had nowhere to go, but they sent her off, sobbing, with her mobile phone and coat, central London 3am. Fortunately she had us to phone and we were able to arrange a hotel and an Uber to get there. It was a horrible situation made worse by bullying 999 staff and in my view absolutely disgusting behaviour from the met police.

I agree. I know someone whose wife was in last stages of Alzheimer's and she died in her sleep and he was sent out to get a defib. That could easily have been at least one more death, and possibly more because he admitted that he had no idea where he was, or what speed he was doing, when he drove out to get one.

That is appalling. Its also completely counter productive if you want an accurate version of events- making someone even more distressed than they are already means they are going to get flustered/confused over the details.

Also, surely she shouldn't touch the body anyway if the police are coming and are suspecting foul play right off the bat. NO way would I touch a decomposing body, I dont give a flying fck what 999 told me