ne nah ne nah ne nah whoo whoo

Day 3
Road shift day at Prospect station
A bit of a hiccup over transport this morning meant I had to chase “my”crew down at a nursing home to join up with them. After leaving the patient at a smaller hospital they showed me over the vehicle- and later got “pinged” for taking more than 20 minutes to clear! The shift supervisor was happy with the explanation, but the service is trying to speed up clearance times, when you see ten ambulances lined up in the bay at the hospital you can see why but you do have to wonder why they don’t just page the crews to move on.
We then went quiet- yup the Q word, which gave me a bit of time to catch up on emails etc. Emily and Ian were most apologetic as Prospect is normally busy, but hey we all know how it goes when there's a third on shift. We took the opportunity to dash out and grab something to eat and then got put on break. The (union) rules state the crews get a 20 minute break every four hours- so true to ambulance form we nearly managed to finish eating before we got called out for the rest of the day. Once we got going we were on the road until virtually the end of the guys' shift at 5.00.
Every trip to the hospital I would be accosted by a different crew member off one of the other stations who would ask me where I was from and about the exchange and everyone was very friendly. The hospital system was a bit different to what we’re all used to in Dunedin. Triage is handled by one of the reception staff who will tell the crew where their patient is going (section A, B, waiting room etc), there is an orderly waiting by the door who will get a bed, make it up if needed and bring it over and several hospital staff will appear as if by magic to help with the patient transfer. Orderlys also bring patients down from the wards to the main door for transfer to PTS! Hidden out of sight from the main door is a nursing station for further handover of the less serious cases and then the patient is left with no hanging around- serious cases get handed over to a doctor at resus- also staffed by lots of people at time of transfer.
The most notable job of the day was a call as we left the RAH (Royal Adelaide Hospital) to go to Prospect station where a man had turned up saying that the aliens had told him to kill an ambulance officer- oh yes SAPOL (Police) were on the way! As you can imagine we were full of enthusiasm for this job and rushed there as quickly as we could, commenting how lucky it was that the other crew were fifteen minutes into their break (inside the station) and so would not have to walk out of the building and deal with this…..gentleman! So we were MOST upset when a higher priority call came in and we had to dash past the station (and attending Police) with the lights and sirens going off to the other job- what a shame and we had SO hoped to meet him.
Wayne (the eastern area shift leader) came back to pick me up and kindly gave me a Claire a quick tour of the city which has some impressive architecture and that was it for another day- apart from tea of course (I can assure you no indigenous species died to feed me)