People think there are ambulances waiting to pick patients up – they are wrong (Picture: ES)

A paramedic was sacked recently for refusing to pick up a patient because he had worked for more than 11 hours without a break.

We asked readers whether the paramedic, Edmund Daly, should have been suspended and an incredible 79 per cent of you said no, NHS funding was to blame.

The article also sparked interest from paramedics who took Mr Daly’s side and prompted Broken Paramedic blogger Mathew Westhorpe to get in touch.

We invited him to write a piece for us, detailing the stresses the ambulance service is under and why cases like that of Mr Daly occur, and his experiences within the health service.




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The Thin Green Line

by Mathew Westhorpe

London, home to 8.6 million and place of work to millions more, is a cosmopolitan hive of activity which enjoys the 24-hour protection of world-class emergency services.

London Ambulance Service caters for all health-related emergencies, responding to 4,500 calls every day with its fleet of approximately 800 response vehicles crewed by professional clinicians who work endlessly to deliver the best possible care.

As the city’s residents go about their business, they take for granted that there are plenty of ambulances waiting patiently nearby until they are needed. Sadly, they are mistaken.

The number of 999 calls received far outstrips available resources. As too few ambulance crews scramble from call to call and dispatch staff desperately try to keep all the chess pieces in play, that protective blanket of emergency cover is stretched ever thinner.

Until it breaks.

Serving the public need is the number one priority for all emergency personnel, but increasingly we are seeing the needs of beleaguered staff sacrificed to deliver care in desperate circumstances.

Every shift will invariably be filled with numerous challenging calls. Only minutes after explaining to a grieving relative that ‘there was nothing more we could do’, a crew might find themselves dealing with a heart attack, a collapsed drunk, a crying baby, an asthma sufferer or any of a thousand other interpretations of an emergency. Apparently, sometimes even poorly pigeons.

In 2014 paramedics took part in a strike over pay (Picture: ES)

The work is relentless, physically and emotionally demanding, and will often stretch to 13 or 14 hours as crews are continually asked to work harder, dig deeper and give more.

The hard truth is that even healthy ambulance staff have their limits. Their ability to maintain the level of care expected, or even drive a speeding vehicle, is unavoidably eroded by this attrition. Staff health and retention has become a critical concern for ambulance trusts around the country.

Last week, the Metro reported on the case of Edmund Daly, a 30-year veteran paramedic who is no longer practising as a paramedic after refusing to attend a 999 call due to fatigue. Daly’s case is a sad indicator of the desperation of staff pushed beyond breaking point by an inadequate system.

Many feel Daly should have handled the issue differently, but staff are damned if they do, damned if they don’t; elsewhere in the country, a 63-year-old ambulance worker crashed an ambulance nine hours into his night shift, resulting in the death of the patient on board. Both cases are examples of staff pushed too hard. There will be more.

Running the ambulance service can be like a game of chess (Picture: Alamy)

Yet public scrutiny only ever falls on the individuals, never the underlying cause.



Is there a solution? Or should we just continue to expect superhuman performance from our paramedics then castigate them when they fail?

The answer is that the public needs to use available healthcare services more appropriately and the government needs to inject more funds. Until then, no amount of moving existing chess pieces around will result in anything more than delaying the inevitable checkmate.

Meanwhile, the pawns will continue to fall.