Another set of nights is out of the way. It was relatively quiet .. I can say that now I've got a few days off. Quiet means we didn't get wiped out by any major jobs and actually met our Immediate graded call time targets. We only dealt with 30+ but they didn't end up with too many arrests. There were the same drunken fights from outside the usual drinking hell holes. The participants not being too bothered to take things further and going their separate ways relatively unscathed. We still ran out of units though, meaning I got the chance to attend a few calls by myself.
I was met by ambulance crews on most of these who rarely have a quiet night. I feel sorry for the ambos who have to deal with alot of crap from our shared customer base. It makes me feel rather angry when they get abused and their time is wasted. My old man was an ambulance driver when he first left the army but that was the day's of scoop them up, patch them up and get them to the nearest casualty which was never far away. Today these people are dedicated health professionals and highly qualified. Their pay should be on a parity with ours and I along with all other police workers respect them for the job they do.
One of the calls was to assist the ambos with a collapsed drunk male refusing to leave a bus. There were two ambulance vehicles present, a lone responder and a double crewed unit. I trudged upto the top deck to find a prone individual on the floor. He was conscious speaking and basically playing the dead weight game. They had already completed their checks and deduced there was nothing wrong with him medically. He was intoxicated but more I suspect from chewing khat than alcohol. After much persuasion which failed, he was just lifted unceremoniously by a joint services move and carried off the bus down the stairs and placed on the pavement still pleading illness and claiming to have lost the use of his legs.
Now we had a predicament, who was taking him. I was all for just leaving him there convinced that as soon as we'd left he'd get up and go home. The ambos quite rightly said that they'd receive further calls to a male collapsed in the street and have to come back. If I'd arrested him it would be the same result with him getting booked in and claiming an immediate medical condition that would have needed him going to hospital. Our police surgeons under a new scheme are not as accessible, so we are having to use A + E on a more frequent basis.
I was solely tempted to resort to methods of days gone by. This might have involved a police van and a drive to more scenic surroundings where he could be dropped off. I am of course more professional than that .. we all knew he would be wasting the time of the NHS tonight to cover everybody's backsides. So he was strapped up to see the doctor in casualty as he wanted to, just in case .. duty of care and all that.
I saw later that the same waste of space was in one our custody suites. The doctor had refused to treat him due to his conduct and he'd spat at one of the ambos, so backs having been covered he ended up in the right place after all.
The courts are supposed to take these type of assaults on NHS staff more seriously. I don't know if they do - or like us in the police it's seen as part of the job. It shouldn't be that way, I can live with it as a policeman but the ambos and nurses should be protected more by the law, because they are truly good people.
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