On call
Paramedics are exposed to the good and bad in emergency situations. At times they are regarded as heroes, saving the lives of those in need. But sadly, they can also be treated as villains, attacked by those they are trying to help. Here, we delve into the life of one officer to see what it really takes to work in this high-pressure job.
WORDS MICHELLE FRENCH
It’s the start of a new working day for officer in charge Mick O’Brien at the Maroochydore ambulance station. He has just come off a long shift the previous night where three people were involved in a deadly cliff fall at Point Cartwright. Around the station it has been described as one of the biggest jobs attended in years, with some paramedics still in shock. Mick may be slightly tired but, like clockwork, he is ready to serve his community for another day. As the 38-year-old points out, you never really know what to expect in the day in the life of an ambulance officer.
6.45am
000 call received from Coolum, 52-year-old male with facial swelling, rapid heart rate and a rash all over. Mick first joined the Queensland Ambulance Service 19 years ago after enjoying a school work experience placement. Back then, things were very different. “You would go to a station, be given a kit and be told that’s going to be your car for the day. We had a motor vehicle accident car, a coronary care car and so on. But now all the cars are set up exactly the same. We used to go out, pick people up, give them pain relief and take them to hospital. A lot of work that used to be done in the emergency department (in hospitals) is now administered by us to the patient, such as tubing and drugs. I think more lives are being saved because of it,” he explains.
7.15am
000 call received from Tewantin, 84-year-old male with chest pain. The set-up of the ambulance station is like a big house, with a living room, kitchen and even beds for those working night shift. When a call comes through over the PA, such as a life-threatening code one, it’s all hands on deck to get to the scene quickly and safely. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve only got five minutes left of your shift. If it’s life-threatening you’re out the door,” Mick says. All cars are fitted with sat-navs, which make finding the incident much easier. But while out on the road officers still come across delays. “Cars these days are soundproofed. So they just don’t see or hear you. That can be really frustrating,” Mick says.
9.30am
000 call received from Mooloolaba, 40-year-old male involved in a traffic accident, trapped between car and guard rail, fractured leg. Once at the scene, officers clinically analyse the situation. “You sort out who needs help first and then administer what you can,” he explains. While the average person may find horrific injuries unbearable to cope with, Mick says it’s actually dealing with the families at the scene that can be the most difficult aspect. “Most ambos have the ability to switch off and go very clinical. They’ve got a job to do. But there are some jobs that do stick in your head. I remember there was a drowning up at Double Island Point. Two kids were in the water and got swept out in a rip. The mum and dad went into the water and a fisherman pulled one of the kids out, and the dad got the other kid. But the mum got caught. We got there and were resuscitating the mother but she ended up dying. We asked the dad if he wanted us to tell the two kids, who were probably about eight and 10, and he said yes. So we had to tell these two kids that their mum wasn’t coming back,” he recalls.
10am
000 call from Currimundi, 17-year-old male involved in fall, head lacerations. Mick says dealing with life-threatening injuries on a day in, day out basis can certainly desensitise an officer. “I don’t know whether it’s a coping mechanism, but you do become more hardened. Ambos by nature have a pretty dark sense of humour. Your biggest debrief you’ll ever do is having a cup of coffee over the bonnet of an ambulance talking about what you’ve just done,” he says. Mick points out a job can really affect an officer at the end of the day, when the shift ends. Luckily for Mick, wife Suzy is a nurse and can understand what he deals with on each shift.
11.20am
000 call received from Beerwah, car rollover Bruce Highway, four patients involved. The risks involved in being a paramedic are also high, as Mick experienced first-hand. “It was an entrapment in a car. I had a set of gloves on and have gone up underneath to help extricate the patient, and a big shard of glass ripped through my glove and cut my finger. So I was an exposed wound with all his blood. I got up to the hospital and one of the doctors goes, ‘Oh, have you tried to put a line (IV) in here?’ I said ‘No, I put it in the other arm’ and he said ‘He’s got track marks.’ So I had to have all these tests, but luckily I was fine. It’s scary stuff,” he says. Mick reveals violence on the scene also tends to be an increasing trend. “If it’s a medical condition and they’re diabetic then they don’t know what they’re doing. But your Friday night drinkers, that’s not called for,” he says. As a result, self-defence classes will be rolled out this year in an attempt to better protect paramedics.
11.30am
000 call from Marcoola, six-year-old male fell out of a tree, fractured arm. Mick says a lot of people’s perceptions of ambulance officers is they only work with trauma patients. “It does depend on what station you’re at, but a majority of your work is actually medical. So that’s things like your chest pains and diabetes,” he says. “We still get your car accidents and kids falling off swings, but we have an ageing population up here and a lot of nursing homes,” he says.
13.22pm
000 call from Nambour, fire in a kitchen, no patients. All officers involved in the previous night’s job are summoned to Kawana station for a debrief. “We probably get one of these about once a year. We do them on pretty big jobs,” Mick says of the Point Cartwright incident, which is still being talked about around the station. “It’s to talk more about the logistics. How many crews we had to send, what level of paramedics did what role. How we’d do it differently if we did it tomorrow,” he continues. “The logistics out there were pretty hard. When you’ve got multiple resources and you’re trying to liaise with choppers and bring them in, it’s pretty full on,” he says. A counselling service called Priority One contacts Mick that day. “They just see how you’re travelling and if you need any counselling down the track,” he says.
14.27pm
000 call received from Kiels Mountain, 25-year-old male overdose. Before becoming officer in charge at Maroochydore station, Mick worked for five years as an intensive care paramedic for the AGL Action Rescue helicopter based at Sunshine Coast airport. Due to its size, the aircraft is often used to do winches and extrications. “It can land in a very confined space. It’s hard work, a majority of patients do die. But a lot of the time the aircraft gets responded due to its location. This can get there quicker, so you can see a lot of the same patients that you do on the road,” he says. Once in the air, Mick says the biggest thing is dealing with the logistics. “It’s being dropped into a situation and making sense of it all,” he says. Here, time really is of the essence and being able to work under pressure and make the right decisions is crucial.
17.00pm
000 call received from Pacific Paradise, one-year-old female fell over, lump on her head. Mick says all the emergency services work well together. “They know what we’re thinking. You get to know them pretty well,” he says. The backbone of the station, though, is the communications centre, which receives hundreds of emergency calls daily. “When it goes off in here it really goes off. If there’s an accident on the highway you get multiple calls and the switchboard just lights up,” Mick explains. Here operators can monitor exactly where units are travelling on the road, and depending on the qualifications of the officers (advanced care or intensive care paramedics) who to send to particular jobs. “It’s quite amazing. If you’re driving down a road and you lose your sat-nav, you can ring comms up and they can say ‘I see where you are, take the next right’,” Mick says. They do get the occasional prank call that can waste resources, but all calls are screened.
17.32pm
000 call received from Golden Beach, 94-year-old female with a sore hip. The average qualified paramedic gets paid about $25 an hour. Money aside, it really does take a certain type of person, super-human almost, to deal with the daily demands of being an ambulance officer. Mick reveals the thought of quitting has probably popped into his head once or twice throughout his career, but at the end of the day it’s a satisfying job.
“Some of the scenes you go into you do see people at their worst. But there are really rewarding jobs too. The most rewarding case I’ve had, we flew out to a six-year-old boy. He’d been ejected out of a high-speed rollover and he had massive head injuries. We got there and this kid was on his last legs. We kept the blades turning, and I had to determine if we’d come into Nambour Hospital and stabilise him, or go to a tertiary hospital in Brisbane, where he had the best chance of surviving. We ploughed on through to Brisbane. He lived to Brisbane and the consultant said ‘He’s not going to make it,’” Mick recalls.
“About a week later I rang up and asked to speak to the consultant and he said ‘I can’t believe I’m telling you this but he lived.’ It was partly attributed to what we had done during the transfer. Two or three months later I got a phone call from the mother and they asked to come out and have morning tea with us. So they brought the little fella out,” he says. Later that evening two 000 calls are received at the same time for women about to give birth. The crews are dispatched. As Mick points out with a smile, the role of a paramedic can go from one extreme to another.
Story: Michelle French, Issue 616, March 4th 2010.
Paramedics are exposed to the good and bad in emergency situations. At times they are regarded as heroes, saving the lives of those in need. But sadly, they can also be treated as villains, attacked by those they are trying to help. Here, we delve into the life of one officer to see what it really takes to work in this high-pressure job.
WORDS MICHELLE FRENCH
It’s the start of a new working day for officer in charge Mick O’Brien at the Maroochydore ambulance station. He has just come off a long shift the previous night where three people were involved in a deadly cliff fall at Point Cartwright. Around the station it has been described as one of the biggest jobs attended in years, with some paramedics still in shock. Mick may be slightly tired but, like clockwork, he is ready to serve his community for another day. As the 38-year-old points out, you never really know what to expect in the day in the life of an ambulance officer.
6.45am
000 call received from Coolum, 52-year-old male with facial swelling, rapid heart rate and a rash all over. Mick first joined the Queensland Ambulance Service 19 years ago after enjoying a school work experience placement. Back then, things were very different. “You would go to a station, be given a kit and be told that’s going to be your car for the day. We had a motor vehicle accident car, a coronary care car and so on. But now all the cars are set up exactly the same. We used to go out, pick people up, give them pain relief and take them to hospital. A lot of work that used to be done in the emergency department (in hospitals) is now administered by us to the patient, such as tubing and drugs. I think more lives are being saved because of it,” he explains.
7.15am
000 call received from Tewantin, 84-year-old male with chest pain. The set-up of the ambulance station is like a big house, with a living room, kitchen and even beds for those working night shift. When a call comes through over the PA, such as a life-threatening code one, it’s all hands on deck to get to the scene quickly and safely. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve only got five minutes left of your shift. If it’s life-threatening you’re out the door,” Mick says. All cars are fitted with sat-navs, which make finding the incident much easier. But while out on the road officers still come across delays. “Cars these days are soundproofed. So they just don’t see or hear you. That can be really frustrating,” Mick says.
9.30am
000 call received from Mooloolaba, 40-year-old male involved in a traffic accident, trapped between car and guard rail, fractured leg. Once at the scene, officers clinically analyse the situation. “You sort out who needs help first and then administer what you can,” he explains. While the average person may find horrific injuries unbearable to cope with, Mick says it’s actually dealing with the families at the scene that can be the most difficult aspect. “Most ambos have the ability to switch off and go very clinical. They’ve got a job to do. But there are some jobs that do stick in your head. I remember there was a drowning up at Double Island Point. Two kids were in the water and got swept out in a rip. The mum and dad went into the water and a fisherman pulled one of the kids out, and the dad got the other kid. But the mum got caught. We got there and were resuscitating the mother but she ended up dying. We asked the dad if he wanted us to tell the two kids, who were probably about eight and 10, and he said yes. So we had to tell these two kids that their mum wasn’t coming back,” he recalls.
10am
000 call from Currimundi, 17-year-old male involved in fall, head lacerations. Mick says dealing with life-threatening injuries on a day in, day out basis can certainly desensitise an officer. “I don’t know whether it’s a coping mechanism, but you do become more hardened. Ambos by nature have a pretty dark sense of humour. Your biggest debrief you’ll ever do is having a cup of coffee over the bonnet of an ambulance talking about what you’ve just done,” he says. Mick points out a job can really affect an officer at the end of the day, when the shift ends. Luckily for Mick, wife Suzy is a nurse and can understand what he deals with on each shift.
11.20am
000 call received from Beerwah, car rollover Bruce Highway, four patients involved. The risks involved in being a paramedic are also high, as Mick experienced first-hand. “It was an entrapment in a car. I had a set of gloves on and have gone up underneath to help extricate the patient, and a big shard of glass ripped through my glove and cut my finger. So I was an exposed wound with all his blood. I got up to the hospital and one of the doctors goes, ‘Oh, have you tried to put a line (IV) in here?’ I said ‘No, I put it in the other arm’ and he said ‘He’s got track marks.’ So I had to have all these tests, but luckily I was fine. It’s scary stuff,” he says. Mick reveals violence on the scene also tends to be an increasing trend. “If it’s a medical condition and they’re diabetic then they don’t know what they’re doing. But your Friday night drinkers, that’s not called for,” he says. As a result, self-defence classes will be rolled out this year in an attempt to better protect paramedics.
11.30am
000 call from Marcoola, six-year-old male fell out of a tree, fractured arm. Mick says a lot of people’s perceptions of ambulance officers is they only work with trauma patients. “It does depend on what station you’re at, but a majority of your work is actually medical. So that’s things like your chest pains and diabetes,” he says. “We still get your car accidents and kids falling off swings, but we have an ageing population up here and a lot of nursing homes,” he says.
13.22pm
000 call from Nambour, fire in a kitchen, no patients. All officers involved in the previous night’s job are summoned to Kawana station for a debrief. “We probably get one of these about once a year. We do them on pretty big jobs,” Mick says of the Point Cartwright incident, which is still being talked about around the station. “It’s to talk more about the logistics. How many crews we had to send, what level of paramedics did what role. How we’d do it differently if we did it tomorrow,” he continues. “The logistics out there were pretty hard. When you’ve got multiple resources and you’re trying to liaise with choppers and bring them in, it’s pretty full on,” he says. A counselling service called Priority One contacts Mick that day. “They just see how you’re travelling and if you need any counselling down the track,” he says.
14.27pm
000 call received from Kiels Mountain, 25-year-old male overdose. Before becoming officer in charge at Maroochydore station, Mick worked for five years as an intensive care paramedic for the AGL Action Rescue helicopter based at Sunshine Coast airport. Due to its size, the aircraft is often used to do winches and extrications. “It can land in a very confined space. It’s hard work, a majority of patients do die. But a lot of the time the aircraft gets responded due to its location. This can get there quicker, so you can see a lot of the same patients that you do on the road,” he says. Once in the air, Mick says the biggest thing is dealing with the logistics. “It’s being dropped into a situation and making sense of it all,” he says. Here, time really is of the essence and being able to work under pressure and make the right decisions is crucial.
17.00pm
000 call received from Pacific Paradise, one-year-old female fell over, lump on her head. Mick says all the emergency services work well together. “They know what we’re thinking. You get to know them pretty well,” he says. The backbone of the station, though, is the communications centre, which receives hundreds of emergency calls daily. “When it goes off in here it really goes off. If there’s an accident on the highway you get multiple calls and the switchboard just lights up,” Mick explains. Here operators can monitor exactly where units are travelling on the road, and depending on the qualifications of the officers (advanced care or intensive care paramedics) who to send to particular jobs. “It’s quite amazing. If you’re driving down a road and you lose your sat-nav, you can ring comms up and they can say ‘I see where you are, take the next right’,” Mick says. They do get the occasional prank call that can waste resources, but all calls are screened.
17.32pm
000 call received from Golden Beach, 94-year-old female with a sore hip. The average qualified paramedic gets paid about $25 an hour. Money aside, it really does take a certain type of person, super-human almost, to deal with the daily demands of being an ambulance officer. Mick reveals the thought of quitting has probably popped into his head once or twice throughout his career, but at the end of the day it’s a satisfying job.
“Some of the scenes you go into you do see people at their worst. But there are really rewarding jobs too. The most rewarding case I’ve had, we flew out to a six-year-old boy. He’d been ejected out of a high-speed rollover and he had massive head injuries. We got there and this kid was on his last legs. We kept the blades turning, and I had to determine if we’d come into Nambour Hospital and stabilise him, or go to a tertiary hospital in Brisbane, where he had the best chance of surviving. We ploughed on through to Brisbane. He lived to Brisbane and the consultant said ‘He’s not going to make it,’” Mick recalls.
“About a week later I rang up and asked to speak to the consultant and he said ‘I can’t believe I’m telling you this but he lived.’ It was partly attributed to what we had done during the transfer. Two or three months later I got a phone call from the mother and they asked to come out and have morning tea with us. So they brought the little fella out,” he says. Later that evening two 000 calls are received at the same time for women about to give birth. The crews are dispatched. As Mick points out with a smile, the role of a paramedic can go from one extreme to another.
Story: Michelle French, Issue 616, March 4th 2010.
