I sit down and check each screen
Set up my desk, log in, go “green”.

It’s now almost six months since I wrote something here. Probably too long, but hey — this was never for much other than writing things down when I felt like it. Since then we’ve had another one or two Covid waves, the festive period and the madness that brings, and a promotion and a whole lot more responsibility.

It’s been six weeks since I last managed to write something, which is a reflection of how busy things have been recently. I’ve been going to work, working solid for the full shift, and coming home tired and wanting to get to bed. But even so, I still love what I’m doing, and I got something this week that reminded me why I do this job.

It’s been almost a month since I wrote my last post about having been asked to start training someone. It’s been a month that’s absolutely flown by. This one is less a post and more a collection of thoughts that training has given me.

I found out at the end of my last shift that starting next week, I’ll be training up a new call handler. That means taking someone coming into the control room for the first time, someone taking on something that’s not quite like any other job, and building them up from almost scratch to be a fully-fledged call handler. And thinking about that on my way home, my overriding thought was not trepidation or nervousness or even pride — it was simply of what a privilege that is.

You’ve found someone unconscious. You’re not sure what’s happened. It could be a family member at home; it could be a perfect stranger in the street. Either way, they may need medical help — and if you’re the only one there, you’re the only one who can get it for them. What do you do?

A while ago, I built Railator, for fun and to give me a chance to learn a few new things. It’s a very simple progressive web app that pulls train data from National Rail APIs and presents it. Much more recently, I added Pathfinder to it, which is a London-only tool to find paths (duh, really?) between any two given tram, DLR, tube, overground, or some rail stations. Again, this was mostly for fun and because it might help me learn a few more things, but I did have some ideas about how it could end up being real-world helpful for me. It turned out to be way more complicated than I was expecting.

When I was writing my last post, I was feeling a bit down and fed up after a run of shifts where not much happened, taking lots of non-emergency, low-acuity calls. This post is the complete opposite: this shift gave me a reminder of why we do what we do — because we save lives and help people.

This is the story of a shift where everything happened.

My last couple of weeks at work haven’t had anything really out of the ordinary in them. It’s been a very ordinary run of chest pains, back pains, abdominal pains, breathing problems, bleeding, and passed-out drunk people. It’s left me thinking about impostor syndrome — something I come across both as a developer and now as a 999 call handler — and, more widely, about something I’m calling organisational self-importance syndrome: how the ambulance service often likes to think of itself as the people swooping in to save the day. It’s not the only kind of organisation guilty of that, but there’s something about being an emergency service that seems to give it that kind of air.

Public-access lifesaving equipment is not a new idea: life rings by lakes and rivers are a very common sight, as are (to a lesser extent) things like throw lines and public SOS telephones. That said, awareness of and access to public-access defibrillators is still relatively new in comparison, and it’s really only the last few years that we’ve seen any kind of rise in awareness and availability. Even newer than that are other types of public-access lifesaving kits that we’re only just starting to see: things like trauma kits, first aid kits, etc.