Is it U to call an ambulance for labour if there is no immediate danger?

[Where4l]

Not first baby.

5-10 minute ride by taxi to the hospital or 15 mins (ish) by bus. No complications and not a high risk pregnancy. Plenty of time to get there by either of the above, as in baby not imminent, early labour but calls an ambulance to get to the hospital.

Unreasonable or not?

@Ozanj It absolutely isn't made up. I'm a frontline paramedic and @Neenaw999 has told it EXACTLY how it is at the moment. The service is broken and even high priority calls are waiting hours on end, sometimes an entire day, for an ambulance.

Putting a low risk uncomplicated pregnant woman in an ambulance is just adding to those pressures and is completely irresponsible. The chances are an ambulance won't even get dispatched as NeeNaw has explained.

Not all that long ago I went to a young girl in the early stages of labour. Her mum rang delivery suite and their advice was to take some paracetamol and have a warm bath then call the community midwife at 8am (this was about 6am). They weren't happy with this so decided to call 999 for an ambulance thinking we'll just take her. We rock up, ring delivery suite back and they very firmly stated that they'd already given her advice and she should not have gone against that advice and that we were not to take her. So we left her at home to ring the community midwife as advised. That was abuse of the service and naivety into how the system actually works. Just because you call an ambulance it doesn't mean that a) you'll get one and if you do b) that we will actually take you. We don't have to take people to hospital if there is no clinical need even if they are demanding to go.

And there's no such thing, and never has been 'an ambulance on standby' in case things take a turn for the worse. As NeeNaw explained we can barely cover life threatening calls at the moment so there's no chance of a 'just in case' ambulance waiting up the road!!

@Clevs
Thanks for backing me up. It's definitely time for a public campaign to show inappropriate use, we need more than the usual 'please choose wisely, do you really need us' adverts. We need examples of what is inappropriate. Calls for sore throats, calls for cut fingers, calls recently where they've already been to a&e and decided the wait is too long, so have gone home and called an ambulance for us to provide home treatment or magically push them to the front of the queue, because we all know arriving in an ambulance gets you seen first, right?

We need brutal honesty. Maybe examples of 200 patients waiting, come and look at my screens, you tell me who gets the next ambulance, you tell me who you think shouldn't get one at all.

Maybe I'll make an app and a load of money to retire with 😂

@Ozanj
Another paramedic here and I can assure you that everything @Neenaw999 said is 100% true and emergency dispatchers have possibly the most stressful job in the NHS right now.

Recently I went to a teenager (some mother's little boy) you was underneath a car with life threatening injuries after coming off his motorbike. We were dispatched to him 20 minutes after the call came in, there was no ambulance available to go to him until this point. We weren't actually available to go to him as we were over 6 hours into our shift without a break but volunteered anyway, and the relief in the voice on the radio was audible. The patient was stabilised at the local hospital then taken by helicopter to the regional trauma centre. These are the poorliest of the many very serious patients we go to and there was NO ambulance for him.

I can also assure you that when we get genuine obstetrics emergencies we pull out all the stops with messages flying around all over the place to make sure the mum and baby go to the best hospital for their needs as quickly as possible and that the right staff are ready to receive them. Believe me, nobody wants to be delivering a preterm baby or a high risk mother out of hospital.

It's not unreasonable, because they don't just dispatch an ambulance willy nilly. They assess the situation by asking questions to determine if an ambulance is needed and how quickly it's needed.

Unless you lied about the severity the situation, then it's totally unreasonable. But when in doubt, always call an ambulance and let them determine if you need one.

@Where4l "I got the bus when I was in labour with DC1, I was 5cm+ and a kind lady on the seat behind was applying pressure to my lower back for me and talking to me through the contractions (it was a back to back baby/labour and bloody horrible)"

Gosh - that's full on! Respect to you.

My waters breaking was the first sign of my labour and liquid continued to come out with every contraction for the next few hours along with me puking at regular intervals. That would have been one sorry bus journey for everyone on there!

[quote Neenaw999]@Clevs
Thanks for backing me up. It's definitely time for a public campaign to show inappropriate use, we need more than the usual 'please choose wisely, do you really need us' adverts. We need examples of what is inappropriate. Calls for sore throats, calls for cut fingers, calls recently where they've already been to a&e and decided the wait is too long, so have gone home and called an ambulance for us to provide home treatment or magically push them to the front of the queue, because we all know arriving in an ambulance gets you seen first, right?

We need brutal honesty. Maybe examples of 200 patients waiting, come and look at my screens, you tell me who gets the next ambulance, you tell me who you think shouldn't get one at all.

Maybe I'll make an app and a load of money to retire with 😂[/quote]
I think a hard-hitting TV advert campaign would really help with that, the 'you choose who gets it' idea. Remember those really shocking drink driving adverts (well, not adverts as such) where they were sat in the pub having just one more and then it phased into crash scenes? They caused uproar at the time but look at home, in the main drink driving is completely frowned upon now rather than being perhaps quietly tutted at at the time.

I do vaguely remember an NHS poster campaign that had a queue of people at A&E saying 'should have gone to pharmacy' etc and the last in the queue was a wreath and 'should have been at the front of the queue' or similar but I really think something stronger is the only way to get people taking and thinking.

You won't ever solve it, a proportion of people still won't think, but I'm sure any amount of reduction in those sorts of calls would be helpful?

A bus? No way
An ambulance? Ridiculous

Call a damn taxi. Or a friend

@AyeAyeMister

But the person calling will get triaged and unless there are any red flags it won't be sent out anytime soon. It's just not worth it for a free ride. And I hate bloody tv shows / films that say "call an ambulance " when someone's waters break!

Ironic given that "Call the Midwife" is actually the title of a TV show.

I’m pregnant and single, spent ages thinking about this and have arranged with a couple of people who will have my son and can take me hospital, I also have a little taxi fund as I’m in the middle of nowhere and over an hour to the nearest hospital.

Dh took me to the hospital at 1am with DS. They sent me home. I wish we had just waited in the carpark.... I was back 4 hours later and that drive to the hospital was awful, I was very dilated and felt I needed to push. Poor DH was bricking it thinking I was going to give birth in the passenger seat.

But yes, ambulance not reasonable in those circs - taxi.

Totally unreasonable if no complications/risks, taxi definitely much easier in those circs.

'Call a taxi' - what if no taxi firms will take you? (I know when I was pregnant many companies were very clear they would not take a woman in labour) Or those that will have no availability?

Not everyone has friends who are able to be on standby 24/7 in case they are needed. When I was pregnant many of my friends lived 3+ hours away, the local ones all worked so were not available weekdays 8-6, aside from one who was unemployed but also didn't drive.

There will be alternatives to calling an ambulance for many women in labour. But not for all of them.

Well I wouldn't catch a bus given I'd have been leaking fluid amniotic fluid all the way there and that's pretty anti social.

If I'd been alone when mine went I might have called 111/999 and taken their advice in a "omg my waters have gone 5 weeks early and I'm alone and what happens if baby pops out whilst I'm a taxi" kind of way. I can understand not wanting to be alone in the back of a taxi with a fast moving labour and delivering baby yourself legs akimbo in the back seat or a random taxi driver trying to deliver baby in a lay by etc.

As it was, we called a taxi as DH was with me.

Totally unreasonable unless you were bleeding excessively or crowning

Totally unreasonable, it happens all the time. We call them maternataxi’s 🙄

And it’s because we busy doing these jobs

Completely depends on circumstances. My labours were both pretty quick and we live 45/50mins at least from a hospital. So yes, I'd call an ambulance to get there in time, or I'd likely be giving birth at the side of the road! My last was born on the loo at home. - it was that quick!

@Poppitt58 you're absolutely right that it's ableist to assume everyone can learn to drive, and the person getting arsey with you is only doing so because they know they're in the wrong but would prefer to make it seem like you're being some kind of killjoy. It's a shitty practice but a lot of people engage in it.

People saying 'kids are more expensive than cars' etc are being wilfully obtuse or absolutely oblivious to other people's circumstances.

Added to that, even if you are able bodied and have the spare funds, provisional driving licences aren't even being processed in nine months at the moment.

My 2nd child was born very quickly and the midwife said I should consider calling an ambulance with any subsequent labour. I didn't have any more so it wasn't a dilemma I had to deal with.

This was something I worried about a lot for most of my pregnancy. DH doesn't drive, the hospital is a 20-40 mins drive away (depending on traffic), the bus takes an hour, runs infrequently and the nearest bus stop is a 15 min walk from our house. Our nearest family is 4+ hours away and all my friends pre-baby work and commute to get there! It's all very well saying take a taxi but the local taxi companies don't offer a service at certain times of day eg if they're pre-booked to do school pickups. I rang several taxi companies to take me to the train station whilst I was pregnant and none answered the phone for a two hour period!

I was terrified of either going in too early and being turned away, meaning we'd have to get bus/taxi back again and repeat. Or else leaving it too late as no taxi available and having the baby in a taxi on the hard shoulder of the M25!

Thankfully, I had to have an induction at 38 weeks, which was booked two weeks in advance, leaving plenty of time to arrange a lift to the hospital and which meant I could do all of labour at the hospital instead of worrying about getting there!

One of the problems is that maternity units have closed - the one much closer to our house closed a few years ago leaving people no choice but to travel further to the one we had to use.

Yes...I went to hospital alone in a taxi at 5am when my waters broke.

My ex partner is a Paramedic and he told me that people did this all the time, it used to really annoy them. The ambulance service isn't a taxi or bus service. It's wasting NHS resources and taking up an ambulance that could be used for an actual emergency. Especially these days when COVID has had such a huge impact on the capacity of the NHS. Of course, if there's a genuine emergency with a risk to mum and / or baby then an ambulance is appropriate.

They actually said to my friend she'd have to find her own way 5 minutes later was back on the phone and the baby was coming they only just arrived as the baby's head was coming out, can't have been much more than 10 minutes before they got there but felt a lot longer. You have no idea of the situation, so don't judge.

No, I wouldn’t call an ambulance in these circumstances.

I did, however, take an ambulance. The midwife called for it. A bike turned up first then 999 again. Luckily dd was ok as she was starting to get distressed.