Art šŸ’™šŸ³ļøā€šŸŒˆ

Ambulances & Programming

Nothing Special, Everything Special

999

When it comes to politics, I make no apologies for being a staunch lefty. I support people being individuals, with the rights to live however suits them. My outlook is very much that if youā€™re not hurting anyone, why should anyone mind? When it comes to healthcare, Iā€™m eternally grateful for the NHS and I always struggle to understand why the US allows its healthcare system to be so broken.

Now that I work in the NHS, Iā€™ve had the advantage of seeing it as both patient and provider. With the governmentā€™s recent 1% pay rise announcement ā€” much touted by them as very generous in times of austerity and simultaneously condemned by the public as a shameful display of national gratitude to a service that has carried us through the pandemic ā€” I find myself conflicted. As a patient and a member of the public, the NHS is incredible. As a provider, I find it more complicated.

nhs covid-19
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Trust the Uniform

999

The recent disappearance, later confirmed to be abduction and murder, of Sarah Everard in London has thrown me. It threw me early on, just after sheā€™d been reported missing, before anyone knew it was a murder; the confirmation that it was murder (and that the suspect is a serving police officer, no less) only made things worse. I donā€™t really know why ā€” thereā€™s nothing really unusual about this case (other than the serving-police-officer thing, but even thatā€™s not unheard of) ā€” but much of the UK seems to be feeling something similar.

trust safety abuse
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The Ones We Remember

999

Content note: trauma, graphic description

ā€œWhatā€™s the worst call youā€™ve ever had?ā€

Donā€™t be that person. Iā€™ll give you one of my pre-prepared Funny Callsā„¢, and then be very wary of ever talking to you about my job again. The honest answer is the one thatā€™ll leave you wondering if Iā€™ve lost my mind and all sense of normality, and how Iā€™m still doing the job. Itā€™s the same for everyone in the emergency services.

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Building Codidact: Not Just Tech

dev

Iā€™ve been working on Codidact for the last 18 months or so. Weā€™ve built up from nothing, planned what we wanted to do, put systems up, started work, changed course, re-started work, switched systems, and welcomed and lost a whole load of team members along the way. Weā€™ve served just under 5 million requests and 50GB of data in the last month ā€” which is not vast scale, but itā€™s certainly much bigger scale than anything else anyone on our team has worked with. Weā€™ve all learned a lot along the way: our team is still small, and weā€™ve all got other commitments; while everyone has things theyā€™re good at, weā€™ve all had to learn bits of other areas to be able to support each other as well.

codidact sysadmin scale team-building
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Mental Health and 999 ā€” not always the best way

999

Content note: mental health, suicide

Mental health is often spoken about as though itā€™s one cohesive, neatly-packaged topic, in the same way that a physical illness like ā€œbreathing difficultiesā€ might be. When mental health and ambulance services end up on the news, the common refrain is that ā€œmental health calls to 999 are on the riseā€. Whichā€¦ is not wrong, but itā€™s like saying ā€œcalls to 999 for medical conditions are on the riseā€ ā€” itā€™s not specific enough to talk about such a broad topic. What kind of medical conditions? What kind of mental health conditions?

mental-health misconceptions
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Not an Emergency ā€” or the "999 doesn't think I'm worth it" effect

999

Iā€™ve written before about public misconceptions when calling 999. I had planned to touch on this there, but thereā€™s enough nuance and detail that it deserves its own post.

When you call an ambulance, your call is triaged based on your current condition. If itā€™s not critical, an ambulance may not be sent ā€” instead, youā€™ll be directed to contact 111 for further assessment or advice, or to talk to your GP or make your own way to hospital. This can sometimes come across as though the operators at 999, or the ambulance service in general, doesnā€™t care about your problem; the reality is exactly the opposite.

non-emergency urgent-care 111
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Misconceptions about calling 999

999

People call 999 for all sorts of reasons. Most calls are genuine, even if misguided; fortunately, itā€™s only a very small number of calls that are made in bad faith.

That said, we canā€™t handle everything. Folks often see 999 as being the one-stop shop to call to Deal With It when the proverbial has hit the fan, which isnā€™t always the case. Sometimes weā€™re not trained to handle something. Sometimes we donā€™t have the right access. Sometimes weā€™re not the right service.

So here we have: Common Public Misconceptions About Calling 999.

emergency misconceptions
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Working with hierarchical data structures in Rails

dev

As many grizzled veterans of relational databases will know, managing hierarchical data structures is hard. A database just isnā€™t the right tool for the jobā€Š ā€” ā€Šbut, in many cases, itā€™s the tool thatā€™s available. Sometimes the only tool. Environments in which you canā€™t control your stack or your backing stores are common, especially outside of open source projects, which leaves developers in a mess when the need to store a hierarchy crops up halfway through a project.

rails databases
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