Ambulance tonight

[FairViewRosie25]

They’re called to a social services situation. Social services doesn’t exist in this country anymore. Why.

Paramedics seem to be mopping up a lot of stuff that would have been covered by other people. 111 send paramedics out to assess people at home, whereas once it would be a GP's job. I can remember being taken ill at night in my twenties, GP came out was worried about meningitis (it was) he called ahead to the hospital to make sure I had a bed and I went straight in bypassing A&E. I'm not sure that would ever happen now.

This country has not been run for the people for decades. It's all about monied people getting more so.

Calling another poster a prick isn’t exactly the best way to respond is it ? And if you look at the thread there are numerous posts from people not understanding what OP is trying to say.

Try coherence instead of angst filled riddles

I have a terrible habit of starting to talk about something and assuming that because it is clear inside my own my head then it (and the context) is clear for other people as well. It's something I have to be vigilant about because I confuse people.

I think the OP is the same.

It's OP's thread but posters don't understand what she is asking for. She says that she used to work in adult social care but she seems to be upset because someone has called an ambulance.

She hasn't explained who called the ambulance and why and why it has upset her.

Having read the full thread, I now see that she is talking about the people on the BBC programme Ambulance. She is correct in saying that the safety net is now threadbare to the point of being non-existant which is placing an extra burden on the emergency services.

This started in 2010 with the 'austerity' Coalition government and the project was continued by subsequent Conservative governments. The ambulance service seems to be the 'last man standing' and unable to deal with medical emergencies quickly enough due to also having to plug the gaps previously dealt with by adult social care.

OP as gently as possible who has called the ambulance and who is it for. You're assuming people know the situation where an ambulance has been called and not SS. Can you start from the beginning. I've read your next posts but I still can't figure out the situation. Xx

Of course I can understand that. It's your OP people dint understand saying they don't exist! They may be stretched, underfunded etc but they still exist

I would never be so rude.

You'd never be so rude as to call someone a "patronising little prick"? No, you're the epitome of charm and politeness, clearly.

This is nothing new. As a paramedic, I have been regularly going to these types of calls for the past 20 years.

I used to work in homeless prevention and resettlement. The project was funded by ASC money, and had 110 staff when it started approx 15 years ago. We could work with clients for up to 2 years, to make sure they had the life skills they needed to manage a tenancy.

That project has been cut to the point that it now has less than 25 staff and they can only work with clients for 3 months, which isn't long enough to coach them in the skills they need to keep a tenancy together.

There still is. It doesn’t work well now and it didn’t work well in the past either.

Actually, @pinkdelight just said what a lot of us were probably thinking, although it could have been said in a kinder way.

What you've written could have been kinder, too.

I do wonder if the pre-hospital care that emergency ambulances are doing is going too far and there needs to be some consideration of dividing the service. Regularly on these programmes the paramedic and technicians are spending prolonged amounts of time providing GP, social care, mental health and geriatric support that the service was never designed for.

As awful as it sounds, I feel like the ambulance teams need to determine as fast as possible if it is an emergency and if not they hand the job on to an appropriate secondary support team and leave.

We also have the issue of geriatric patients blocking hospital beds and again I wonder if there should be a tertiary emergency geriatric intake ward that is staffed with appropriate clinicians and social care.

When ambulances were driven by ambulance drivers and scooped and ran the time spent per job was probably significantly lower, but more people died as they didn’t get the right golden hour / pre-hospital care. So is there a middle ground where a quick assessment and obs are taken and if it isn’t an emergency they then pass it over to the step down team and leave?

A step down team could book GP appointments, complete referrals and offer limited immediate social care support.

I think the OP is sleeping it off......

It's clear that the OP watched the BBC show Ambulance last night, and observed multiple calls in which a social care referral was promised to those in need, but she has personal experience to suggest that in fact this care is scarce or non existent.

It's been explained multiple times.

I think anyone who watches Ambulance, or has personal experience of this, would strongly agree.

These wonderful, kind responders are making cups of tea and chatting to lonely old people because they are human and they can't turn away. But it's a wild misuse of limited resources. If there was a lower response tier, as suggested up thread, there would be no need for long ambulance visits at all.

I know one old gent who needs lifting after a fall on a near weekly basis. His son had to move in with him but often even he can't lift him. A falls team would be a sensible solution.

There are teams of volunteer first responders, we’ve had experience of them recently. They are first aid trained and carry some equipment and can do emergency support (basic life support / first aid) and offer reassurance until an ambulance comes. But! They are volunteers and can only attend certain calls.

Perhaps that needs extending to volunteer social care support / community supporters? They’d need good safeguarding training and the ability to access supervision and support for themselves. But it definitely could be feasible.

I think we definitely need to think really creatively about what we want and need from our services and how we can provide that.

There are numerous voluntary "befriending" schemes for older people and people with disabilities in my area, but they cannot (and, in my opinion, should not) take the place of statutory services.

Volunteers can be excellent, but they can also be utter shite. You can't "sack" volunteers, and you can't monitor them closely to make sure that the support they're giving is appropriate. And no matter how well you train them, you can't be be sure that they're going to report any significant concerns when they should.

Local authorities have the statutory duty to provide support for elderly people and those with disabilities and the statutory power to act when they need to.

Yes- I used to do alot of work with AgeUK and they had a really excellent scheme called the Good Neighbour Scheme. The volunteers were almost all uniformly excellent in our area. Really caring and genuine. Sometimes people just wanted a chat. One man said he wanted to talk about football a bit but did not have any friends. They provide a totally different service to what ASC should be providing, but truth was there were so many gaps in provision that our volunteers were often the only person the clients ever saw.

It took multiple posts to clear this up, and the OP has still not made a clear statement themselves. I, like many others, had no idea there is a TV show with that name or what its content is. In any case, a show title takes quotation marks. @BlindSpotForCats explains OP's issue. Which is wrongly assuming that because it is clear inside one's own head then it is clear for other people as well.

But we still have social services in this country.

Well yes, it did.
Are you suggesting these people shouldn’t call an ambulance?

I'm sorry xx

its no wonder so many children are abused/killed is it?

thank god your son has you and you're 'coping' xx