Tag: #keethefaith

Cruel to be Kind?

Kindness costs nothing.

Being based in a small rural hospital, we were part of the community. That meant patients expected a certain standard of care. We did our best to oblige but it wasn’t always easy. Some tried to take advantage, the majority appreciated it

An example : in the city, if an elderly person fails out of bed the crew take them to hospital, at best they return them to bed, check them over and drive away. In the country, we’d check them over and return them to their bed if they were uninjured. We’d make the patient a cup of tea and call a friend to see if they could come around to sit with the patient for a while.

The powers that be didn’t like this because jobs took longer and the figures on their computer looked bad, but we still did it.

When I first began with the ambulance service I was an Ambulance Care Assistant, a non-emergency transport driver. Even then we had memos saying we were taking too long when dropping patients back home after hospital stays. That’s because we took the time to settle them and make sure they were comfortable. We put the “care” in Care Assistant into practice. Kindness is free, if ambulance crews can’t show that, who can??

I recently called my broadband service provider to upgrade my service. The person who took the call was friendly, caring and kind. They listened and made me feel like I mattered, something that doesn’t happen often with large companies. If that kind of care can happen elsewhere, why were we being told we were wrong to make patients feel valued?

Many years ago I worked for a large mobile phone retailer. The company was based on a number of principles (I may have mentioned this before), the most meaningful one, the one that has stayed with me, being: Treat Everyone the Way You Expect to be Treated Yourself.

There’s nothing cruel about kindness. Now, more than ever, show some everyday and who knows what might come back to you.

Keep the Faith

Recently I was sitting outside a café with some other people. We noticed a bit of a commotion across the other side of the road. Some large seagulls were attacking a young pigeon, quite savagely.

I stood up and walked over to the scene scaring the seagulls away but, as soon as I turned away they were back. The pigeon was in a bad way but alive so I picked it up and walked back towards the café.

As I walked past the café and the others joined me, the pigeon passed away in my hands.

The people in that café must have thought I was a bit nuts, maybe I was, but I wasn’t going to do nothing. It may have been “nature in action” but my instinct was to try.

It reminded me why I joined the ambulance service in the first place – because I’m a rubbish onlooker and I wanted to help. It also reminded me of the many jobs we did that didn’t have the outcome we wanted. Even when we knew the situation was hopeless, we still tried.

Early in my career an older paramedic told me: “If it’s someone’s time to go, there’s nothing and no-one can change that, but we don’t make that decision!”. At that time the figures showed CPR jobs were around 5-8% successful, but everyone we were called to was in the 92-95% group until we had done our job.

Sometimes that was difficult, especially when you knew the relatives were watching. It would have been so easy to do nothing and tell the family it was over, rather than letting them hold onto some hope as we worked, but there was hope in us too, hope that this patient was one of the 5-8%, and we would never give up until
protocols said we had to.

We never beat nature, the lost ones were always lost but, to shake the hand of the survivor, the one who would not be there if we’d lost our faith – there are no words.