999, what's your emergency by The Blue Light Run

999, what's your emergency?

written by The Blue Light Run on the 25^th February 2013 at 19:20 - Posted in Police Blog

It's not difficult, if you are reporting a crime in progress, a road accident, or someone is in danger ask for the police. If you see a building on fire or a cat up a tree, ask for fire brigade. If someone has collapsed in a shop or suffering a heart attack, then ask for ambulance. If you don't know, tell the operator what's going on and they will decide. Quite often all three will turn up anyway, so don't worry about it. I was a job last week where we had coastguard turn up too, so it was a full house. Anyway I digress.

Last week I attended a concern for safety job. Caller reported that her lodger had come home at 2am with a nasty head injury. The caller couldn't get much out of him due to his intoxication, so the police were sent, 'just in case'. Now I don't mind, but my medical skills are not up to the standard of say a paramedic or ambulance technician. In fact they were nowhere near. My medical skills are BLS (basic life support), a pair of latex gloves and a no.3 field dressing. Our victim of crime (?) was not making any sense, he was hammered (retorically not literally) but there is a chance that his behaviour may be down to a concussion. He had a 2 inch cut along his temple, consistent with hitting a sharp object (or a sharp object hitting him). I requested ambulance and waited. And waited. I cleaned up the wound the best I can and kept the victim talking. Our victim couldn't tell us anything, a very broad Irish accent punctuated every sentence. 45 minutes later ambulance turned up and took one look at him and advised a hospital visit was in order. Guess what, the drunk refused. By now he was sobering up a tad and just wanted his bed. Whilst ambulance tried to convince him to go to A & E we had a snoop around. In the corner of the landladies bedroom was a dressing table, underneath this was some paperwork with some blood on it. Three feet away from this was a radiator with the end cover snapped off and blood on the corner. It would appear we had found the cause of the injury.

I interrogated the caller who stated the drunk had returned home whilst she was in the bath (having consumed a bottle of red wine whilst soaking). He had burst into the bathroom with blood gushing from his head, she told him to get out and then called us. Not ambulance first, us the police with our ill equipped first aid kits and poor basic training. The drunk may have sustained a serious injury which could have been life threatening (he hadn't), and we wasted a lot of time getting ambulance to our location. I asked her why she didn't call ambulance first and she stated that she was 'frightened'. Fair enough, but I still couldn't work out why control hadn't notified ambulance in the first instance. What bothers me is that had the drunk died whilst I was at scene without ambulance, I would be the subject of an IPCC investigation. That doesn't make for a good nights sleep, I can tell you! That was a call I would make to the control room when I left...

Turns out this was merely a drunken accident and the job was updated as such. On the way out the drunk landlady asked if we could remove the drunk lodger. I think there was more to this than met the eye but without her telling me anything, there wasn't much I could do, so I said no. I didn't want the aggravation of homing a drunk for the night and besides he was paying rent, so he was in the right place. The irony is that if she had called ambulance first they might have whisked him away before he started to sober up and make decisions for himself.

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