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Alex Grant, student paramedic at Anglia Ruskin University and for the London Ambulance Service, shares his thoughts on this week's media coverage of the 'shared control room' proposal. In recent news there have been calls from the Home Office to reform the way emergency services collaborate and a published report has suggested a ‘Sledgehammer plan’. This refers to Police, Fi...

This post was first published by Pocket me dic - a paramedic based in Canada. You can follow him on Twit ter@pocketmedicBC Today I want to touch on two topics that go hand in hand: h appiness & stress. When I tell people I work as a paramedic, they automatically relate to the job as being stressful. That is true. They often relate to stress as a paramedic from the calls we g...

​On Thursday, we took delivery of our brand new Driver Training Unit - isn't it beautiful? It's a LWB Fiat Ducato Crew Cab, fully-fitted out with a state-of-the-art mobile clinical assesment centre. We'll be using it for driver assessments for all our new recruits and for driving courses in the new year. We also decided it needed a name and asked our friends and followers on...

Alex Grant, student paramedic at Anglia Ruskin University and for the London Ambulance Service, shares his thoughts on last week's media coverage of the London Ambulance Service. In recent news you may have seen headlines such as “London Ambulance Service put into special measures” (The Independent) and “London Ambulance Service (LAS) rated inadequate by inspectors” (BBC New...

Phil Goodway, a HART paramedic for the South West Ambulance Service NHS Trust, blogs about the standardisation of skill sets across the UK... Picture the scene: a serious head-on car vs car RTC. The incident involves four casualties, all with polytrauma; no HEMS, no BASICS attend but ambulances from three different Trusts arrive. Imagine now that three of the patients have v...

Following on from last week's article in the Guardian - Asking firefighters to be paramedics during a time of cuts is dangerous - Ralph Chadkirk, paramedic for the London Ambulance Service, shares his thoughts on the subject of co-responding to medical emergencies... In 2001, the Fire Brigade’s Union determined that “all FBU members… shall not participate in any proposed co-...

​Back in June, we saw an opportunity to bring together the ambulance and paramedic community of Twitter for a weekly online pow-wow... #MedChat takes place every Thursday evening at 8pm UK time on Twitter. Each week we host an hour’s chat based around a different topic related to paramedic life and paramedicine. Recent topics have included the adrenaline trial, CPD, legal hi...

​Matt Green, a paramedic for an NHS Trust, blogs about a problem for every hungry, tired, hard-working paramedic - what comes first: the emergency call or the meal break? Working as ambulance personnel has all the hallmarks of an exhausting job: long shifts day and night, repetitive heavy lifting and prolonged concentration to ensure a safe, professional and dignified approa...

The growing market for so-called ‘legal highs’ is leaving ambulance staff across the UK struggling to cope with the fallout. Legal highs, officially classed as ‘new psychoactive substances’ or NPSs, are developed to mimic class A drugs, such as cocaine and ecstasy. However, owing to their chemical structure they cannot be classified as illegal, so it is legal to possess and ...

Alex Grant, student paramedic at Anglia Ruskin University and for the London Ambulance Service, shares his thoughts on the subject of violence towards ambulance staff... Violence towards emergency service workers has become all too prevalent in recent years and the media does not seem to be doing enough to correctly inform the public that it is not acceptable. Violence can i...