There is no ambulance service anymore

[Snog]

Twice so far this year NHS111 have told me that my dd needs paramedics to attend for severe chest and abdominal pain and that they are on their way.

Both times the ambulance service called me later and said they would not be attending that night as too busy.

I am posting this because I want people to know that there is no functional ambulance service any more.

If you need an ambulance try to take your loved one to hospital yourself instead. This could save their life.

Obviously when you get to hospital good luck with that but at least you are not waiting for an ambulance that will never come.

but is there data for people who do circumnavigate. Obvs anecdotal but I know a fair few people who have inherited over a million (London house prices) & not paid anything.

Telling your own true story is not scaremongering, but a thread title like “There is no ambulance service anymore” might definitely be perceived as such.
It seems to depend on where you live unfortunately.
We had to call the ambulance for an elderly relative recently and they arrived fairly quickly, but I appreciate that other people might have had different experiences.

The allowance is 1m I thought for family house

They prioritise the real emergencies. Why didn't you take her to hospital yourself ?

Round here they only seem to send them if it's urgent, a friend of mine waited 8 hours after their elderly mother fell and broke her hip in the garden. I had to call one a few months ago when a lady was hit by a car and the ambulance arrived in less than 10 minutes.

I think that is fair enough Ambulances are for real dire emergencies. People abuse the system when they could quite easily get the person to hospital themselves in a car or taxi

It depends where you live. I attended a course recently and the 'first responder' doing the training said never to move to 'x local town' as would wait hours for an ambulance. Fire service is the same. They know there are parts of the country they just can't reach in time to be effective.

Early in the summer my elderly neighbour called me in distress - his wife had collapsed. He was waiting for an ambulance for her and he was very scared. My friend and I helped get her onto her bed - she was chronically ill and had a hospital bed in the living room and sat with him while she drifted in and out of consciousness and waited for four hours for the ambulance to come.

When they arrived the paramedics said that she was the first genuine patient they had had that night - all the others had been drunks, drugs and fights.

The same week a local man fell on the floor of his bathroom and the family suspected he had broken a hip. After he had been waiting ten hours for the ambulance his daughter, a doctor, drove 100 miles to their village, borrowed a stretcher from the local rugby club and a van from a local builder. The family loaded him into the van and drove him to hospital.

My husband was at work when a customer collapsed and unconscious. Control could not give any idea how long an ambulance would take. After five hours with the man deteriorating, getting paler and his breathing more shallow the boss took him to hospital in his car. He had sepsis and spent a week in ITU.

It is not possible to rely on the ambulance service in an emergency anymore. It's not the fault of the paramedics or the the controllers or the hospitals. It is lack of funding.

It depends. The threshold is only £325,000, which isn’t a lot these days, and with the rises in property prices more and more ‘ordinary’ people are being sucked in. So it’s not really a tax on ‘hoarding’ is it ? Once again it’s the people who have slightly more who are expected to cough up.

The richest people in the country are being handed personal tax reductions, corporations are paying less tax and the public are being openly gouged by energy producers who are pocketing obscene windfall profits, with seemingly no limits. The NHS and ambulance services are falling apart and the care system is broken - overseen by private health concerns who charge eye watering sums for basic care, so people have to sell everything they own to pay for it.

We’ve seen in the last couple of days that we now have a government who have no intention of fixing any of this. Instead they’re bent on making the rich even richer, hoping the effects will trickle down, and all the while building up reckless debt for which the tax payer will eventually shoulder the burden if the gamble doesn’t pay off. Those on £100,000 plus will be in the region of £300 a month better of with the abolition of the top rate tax, while those at the bottom end, will keep a princely £14 a month when tax is reduced by 1p in the pound. And yet despite being taxed until the pips squeak and struggling to afford household bills, we don’t seem to mind everything we’ve worked for and already been taxed on over and over again, being taxed again when we pop our clogs. And imagining that any of the tax take will be spent on ‘essential services’ is a joke.

Know where all the defibrillator are locally and how to access and use them too.

That's very good advice, @CornishTiger , so I thought I'd check where my nearest one is.

The two nearest are shown as available "24/7" but also "not available now", which isn't very helpful. One is at the local primary school and the other at a social club that's only open evenings/weekends, so clearly not 24/7. The next nearest is at an organisation I've never heard of and the location is utterly unclear from the map.

We could do with having one at the local convenience store, which is open 8am - 9pm 364 days a year.

Sorry for your loss @PerrinAybara

I think I read somewhere that lots of defibrillators would make a huge difference to survival rates as timing is crucial. The article was about lone wolf attacks but that point stuck out. I did a FA course with work & they showed us how to use them. Not as scary as you think.

Know where all the defibrillator are locally and how to access and use them too.

@CornishTiger : please could you advise how to check that? I’ve been Googling but results don’t look v reliable (ie I know there is one on our local high st but it doesn’t show up on the site I checked which is heart safe.co.uk)

A broken back for a 90 is & should be top priority- problem is, people are calling ambulances out when they shouldn’t be. My friend had just moved to ICU after being totally fed up of working in A&E saying 70% of the people that had rang for an ambulance (mainly the younger/entitled generation) didn’t need one. People know to say ‘severe chest pain’ as this has to be priority. Meanwhile, 90 year old gets to lie on the floor.

We had this and knew where the defibs were. Abandoning an unconscious elderly parent to get the defib is an entirely different matter.

Lastly, re the people who say ‘move someone yourself’: I would if this was my own family member or a v v good friend

Finding a member of the public, neighbour etc - it can be too risky. In that case, I’d be trying to get a relative on the scene …

My experience: I was 1st in the scene for a very minor road traffic accident in front of my house: one neighbour has stepped into the road as another neighbour was reversing/parking

Driver called an ambulance: the injured person (who was at fault & admitted it to the ambulance who were called & arrived a couple of hours later) is now trying to make an injury claim against the driver.

It’s a hard call if you think someone’s life is really at stake but the risk of making an injury worse/dropping or unsafe handling/someone deteriorating in your car etc would make me very reluctant to take anyone except a relative of my own in because I wouldn’t want to be in that situation having tried to help: I would be leaving it to the professionals

My friend had just moved to ICU after being totally fed up of working in A&E saying 70% of the people that had rang for an ambulance (mainly the younger/entitled generation) didn’t need one.

lol, that's defo the issue!

You haven't read the whole thread with all the experiences of long waits have you. My FIL died after one of them. When we were called to say come he might not make it as far as a ward there were 10 ambulances waiting to admit patients. Speaking to

Last time my son was in an ambulance (after a prolonged seizure). They did the paperwork on the way to hospital.

Clearly NOT as life of death as the other patient who are litrally getting revived and blue lighted.

I have 'life threatening' illnesses, that does not mean Im going to keel over dead right now. I do not need an ambulance just due to terminology I have lived with these conditions most my life as do millions of others.

Life threatening does NOT equal 'immediate'.

You the one being rude and entitled about the ambulance system when you weren't deemed a priority. One day when you are an actually dying and need it you might understand better why some people come far ahead of those who have time to sit on 111 (non emergancy line) and wait around for hours.

My friend had just moved to ICU after being totally fed up of working in A&E saying 70% of the people that had rang for an ambulance (mainly the younger/entitled generation) didn’t need one

chinny reckon

@Kendodd

Yes you are right.

I hope everyone will remember that all this has happened under a tory government.
If you vote Tory this is what you get and you can't complain. They have consistently shown us who they are.

The tories instigated a systemic and calculated underfunding of NHS and this is the totally predictable outcome.

Next time there is a general election just think about this, particularly if you are lucky enough to live in a marginal constituency as you can affect change

Again, was it a doctor or someone from 111?

You're aware those that answer the phone for 111 aren't doctors right?

Putting defibrillators in old phone boxes seems the obvious answer to me. I don't know who owns phone boxes though, BT?

That wasn’t the issue at all. The issue was the ambulances waiting 15 hours to unload outside A&E. It was in the newspaper at the time and anyway I drove past regularly and could see them queuing outside. They were waiting 15 hours to unload because of problems in social care. That was in the summer so fuck knows what winter will be like.