Day two- busy busy.
A stunning meal at the heartily recommended Woolshed last night (it has one of those bucking bulls- not in action- boo shame). We met the Director for the Rural areas Neale S- who is highly entertaining- I didn’t quite catch the whole of his story about running over a kangaroo but the one about the dangling buffalo gave us all a laugh. I had kangaroo steak- ok I’m not normally into eating unique indigenous fauna - but hey it just had to be done sometime.
Day two kicked off at the more reasonable time of 8.30- except that of course we’re all still working to good old NZ time and all woke up anywhere between 4.00 am and 6.30 am.
First up we went to the E.O.C at HQ. After squirting our hands with the obligatory alcohol disinfectant we were introduced to the day’s Duty Manager Steve and Comms room manager Lee and given a tour of the room (which is not small!). The E.O.C. runs comms for the whole State and there were about 6 call takers in with spaces for another four to come in for busy times! Calls go through to North and South dispatchers for the city as well as to a rural dispatchers. Also in the comms room are an ECP (Extended Care paramedic) who gives advice over the phone to callers and a trouble shooter who takes care of notifying Police etc when needed.
The SAAS system is all done by radio call ins- no MDT’s and not even any buttons to push on the radio so you had better believe the dispatchers are BUSY. One thing we all noticed was the radio “chatter” as crews are given all their job details over the air (pager only gives them the address or initial area to head to, a map reference and category), crews call in on response, location, arrival at hospital, clearance and on station. As they're on a Government digitall radio channel which is meant to be secure they give out names, addresses and key locations on air which we all found very strange.
I sat in with Natalie on dispatch for Northern city for a while and couldn’t even try to keep up with her lightening fingers! As crews come in she logs their times in as well as passing on the messages from the call takers- she also has to keep in her head the location of ambulances in her area at all times so she can work out who to dispatch where- no AVL for these guys as yet! All the dispatchers have a printed city map with stations marked on but they also have access to Google maps on one of their three computer screens. Natalie didn’t seem to bother too much with Google but John one of the rural dispatchers was using his to decide which station would get to a rural job more quickly.
After ten minutes of being blown away by how Natalie coped with it all (she had ten ambulances on one screen and six on jobs on the other) I was moved on to see what the call takers were up to. Call takers for SAAS do not have any road experience and work on the PROQA codes we all know and love. As Luke worked his way through the questions the computer would throw up the next set for him to ask. Calls come in from all over the State and are allocated to whoever has been sitting around the longest. I got to sit in on a simple abdo pain and a more difficult call- unfortunately we ran out of time and I had to leave while caller CPR (as taught by Luke) was in progress, the ambulance had just pulled up outside the door- the outcome is unknown.
From the E.O.C. we headed out to Fulham which houses stores, the tech guys and fleet management. The “comms engineering” section was quite something. The team lead by Paul do all the in house electronics for the State. This includes unpacking all the training maniquins and making sure they are working properly before they go out to stations, repairing any that get broken, fixing pagers, and sorting out cellphones, sat phones and radios. To welcome us to the section they had set up a partially put together maniquin on the table which was breathing - veeerry sloowwly.
From there we went and had a look at stores- which was a storeroom- but bigger. All the stores for the State are dispatched from here- either by bus to the rural areas or by the storesmen for the city.
Then we popped into the workshop for the fleet which has six or so hoists (mostly occupied). Not only the vehicles get serviced but the stretchers are also checked out every six months.
A quick stop for a good café lunch and then we headed down to Flinders Uni to see the education unit. Pete and I were travelling with Chris who had been taking a lot of stick from Lee all day about being late at each venue (we‘re mostly talking a few minutes only but Lee is a bit particular), so of course on the way to Flinders Chris got directionally challenged (he’s not from around here you know) after Lee shot ahead of us. But we all rallied round and I think we managed to nearly convince Lee we had taken a tiki tour to the beach on the way out.
We met the whole education team in the tea room and toured the Department. The SAAS career path is quite different to St John. Volunteers go through Cert 2 (PHEC plus a bit) in 3 to 6 (ish) months and then follow it up with Cert 4 (another 3- 6 ish months) which is roughly equivalent to Nat Cert but gives them more drugs to use BUT they have to call up and consult before they use them.
The education team are currently reviewing their training programme to be extended over a six year period to help retain volunteers for longer.
Crocodile and kangaroo for tea tonight!
A stunning meal at the heartily recommended Woolshed last night (it has one of those bucking bulls- not in action- boo shame). We met the Director for the Rural areas Neale S- who is highly entertaining- I didn’t quite catch the whole of his story about running over a kangaroo but the one about the dangling buffalo gave us all a laugh. I had kangaroo steak- ok I’m not normally into eating unique indigenous fauna - but hey it just had to be done sometime.
Day two kicked off at the more reasonable time of 8.30- except that of course we’re all still working to good old NZ time and all woke up anywhere between 4.00 am and 6.30 am.
First up we went to the E.O.C at HQ. After squirting our hands with the obligatory alcohol disinfectant we were introduced to the day’s Duty Manager Steve and Comms room manager Lee and given a tour of the room (which is not small!). The E.O.C. runs comms for the whole State and there were about 6 call takers in with spaces for another four to come in for busy times! Calls go through to North and South dispatchers for the city as well as to a rural dispatchers. Also in the comms room are an ECP (Extended Care paramedic) who gives advice over the phone to callers and a trouble shooter who takes care of notifying Police etc when needed.
The SAAS system is all done by radio call ins- no MDT’s and not even any buttons to push on the radio so you had better believe the dispatchers are BUSY. One thing we all noticed was the radio “chatter” as crews are given all their job details over the air (pager only gives them the address or initial area to head to, a map reference and category), crews call in on response, location, arrival at hospital, clearance and on station. As they're on a Government digitall radio channel which is meant to be secure they give out names, addresses and key locations on air which we all found very strange.
I sat in with Natalie on dispatch for Northern city for a while and couldn’t even try to keep up with her lightening fingers! As crews come in she logs their times in as well as passing on the messages from the call takers- she also has to keep in her head the location of ambulances in her area at all times so she can work out who to dispatch where- no AVL for these guys as yet! All the dispatchers have a printed city map with stations marked on but they also have access to Google maps on one of their three computer screens. Natalie didn’t seem to bother too much with Google but John one of the rural dispatchers was using his to decide which station would get to a rural job more quickly.
After ten minutes of being blown away by how Natalie coped with it all (she had ten ambulances on one screen and six on jobs on the other) I was moved on to see what the call takers were up to. Call takers for SAAS do not have any road experience and work on the PROQA codes we all know and love. As Luke worked his way through the questions the computer would throw up the next set for him to ask. Calls come in from all over the State and are allocated to whoever has been sitting around the longest. I got to sit in on a simple abdo pain and a more difficult call- unfortunately we ran out of time and I had to leave while caller CPR (as taught by Luke) was in progress, the ambulance had just pulled up outside the door- the outcome is unknown.
From the E.O.C. we headed out to Fulham which houses stores, the tech guys and fleet management. The “comms engineering” section was quite something. The team lead by Paul do all the in house electronics for the State. This includes unpacking all the training maniquins and making sure they are working properly before they go out to stations, repairing any that get broken, fixing pagers, and sorting out cellphones, sat phones and radios. To welcome us to the section they had set up a partially put together maniquin on the table which was breathing - veeerry sloowwly.
From there we went and had a look at stores- which was a storeroom- but bigger. All the stores for the State are dispatched from here- either by bus to the rural areas or by the storesmen for the city.
Then we popped into the workshop for the fleet which has six or so hoists (mostly occupied). Not only the vehicles get serviced but the stretchers are also checked out every six months.
A quick stop for a good café lunch and then we headed down to Flinders Uni to see the education unit. Pete and I were travelling with Chris who had been taking a lot of stick from Lee all day about being late at each venue (we‘re mostly talking a few minutes only but Lee is a bit particular), so of course on the way to Flinders Chris got directionally challenged (he’s not from around here you know) after Lee shot ahead of us. But we all rallied round and I think we managed to nearly convince Lee we had taken a tiki tour to the beach on the way out.
We met the whole education team in the tea room and toured the Department. The SAAS career path is quite different to St John. Volunteers go through Cert 2 (PHEC plus a bit) in 3 to 6 (ish) months and then follow it up with Cert 4 (another 3- 6 ish months) which is roughly equivalent to Nat Cert but gives them more drugs to use BUT they have to call up and consult before they use them.
The education team are currently reviewing their training programme to be extended over a six year period to help retain volunteers for longer.
Crocodile and kangaroo for tea tonight!
I'll try and post some photos but I've been having a few issues getting them to upload so keep watching this space.
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