Why would an ambulance not go back to its hospital base?

Post Reply New Topic

I have just witnessed an accident and am still feeling rather skaken and puzzled so I thought I would write about it here.

I was going along the street to the supermarket about an hour ago (it was dark by that time) and saw a man lying on the street unconscious. Two people were in the process of putting him into the recovery position. He had a huge swollen bump on the back of his head that was bleeding a little bit, so he must have fallen over. He was a bald man, so it was easy to see the bump. He was just regaining consciousness by the time I got there, and the people helping him were just in the process of calling an ambulance. He was breathing heavily and making snorting noises in his throat that made it sound like he was having a fit.

One of the people helping him was using his hand to cushion the victim's head from the pavement, which wasn't ideal, so I rolled my scarf into a ball so that they could use that as a pillow instead of using their hand. The man's head started bleeding onto my scarf, but of course I didn't mind because it was an emergency.

Then some more people stopped to help. One of them put a coat over the man's body, and somebody else brought a fleece dressing gown to cover him with. Then a local kebab shop brought out some ice wrapped in a T shirt and we held it on the man's head. By this time he was regaining consciousness and didn't want the ice on his head because he said it was too cold. More and more concerned people stopped to watch / ask if they could help, and one man got a bit impatient and said "it would be better if all these people weren't standing round watching" and when he said that, some people got embarrassed and walked away. However, I had to stay because I had to wait until the ambulance came so that I could get my scarf back. I felt a bit worried that the angry man might think I was just waiting until the end because I was being curious. It wasn't that; I just needed my scarf back.

Anyway the ambulance came and the paramedics helped the man to stand up and walk to get inside, and I got my scarf back and the ladies who had provided a coat and dressing gown got them back, too. Then everybody left, and I went off to do my shopping.

When I was walking back home from the supermarket about ten minutes later, the ambulance was still there. The doors were closed and the lights were flashing. It seemed like they were treating him inside. I was quite surprised. I had assumed they would have whisked the man off to the hospital.

He had admitted to the ambulance staff that he had been drinking "quite a lot" so maybe they were just going to sit with him in there until he sobered up, and then send him back out into the street to walk home. Or maybe they were performing some kind of emergency procedure on him that couldn't be done while they were driving. Or maybe....I don't know. What possible reason could there be for an ambulance team to take a severely concussed drunk man inside the van, and then just stay parked there on the road and not take him to hospital?

I know lots of drunk people have accidents like this every weekend, and the ambulance and emergency staff are probably sick of having to deal with drunks, but nonetheless, a blow to the head is a blow to the head. Why would they not have taken him into hospital? If they deemed him not to be in need of emergency attention, shouldn't the ambulance have gone back to its base in order to be ready to respond to more calls?

Edit: by the way, this happened in the UK, where basic healthcare is free, and people do not have to pay for ambulances. I just thought I'd state that because some of the users reading this may be from countries where if you can't pay, you are denied medical treatment, and that is not the case in the UK.

I've worked in several nursing homes here in the U.S. Sometimes something happened to a resident and we, as nurses, often make the decision to send them to a hospital for further evaluation. There's been a few times when the paramedics arrived, evaluated the resident, and decided not to take him because it wouldn't be to his benefit. Believe me, there's been some rows over this with the paramedics. At times the director of nursing had to get involved in it. We've had paramedics tell us that a patient is too far gone and, since they're DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), it'd be their wish to remain where they are and died in peace. We've had paramedics refuse to take residents because they said all they needed was a simple dressing which we were capable of doing. Some of their refusals were shocking, but I guess ER's are busy and flooded with work as it is and are simply doing the hospitals a favour. Welcome to Modern Health Care, 2013.

I have no real life knowledge of this topic, but when I was a kid there was a tv show on called Emergency about paramedics. Sometimes they would call the hospital and get instructions from the doctors to give some kind of urgent care which they would do, then they'd whisk off to the hospital.

Maybe they sensed it was a non-emergency. They could have done what they could do to treat him in the ambulance then and there and then he'd only have to go to hospital for observation for a night or two. It's probably quicker to treat him on the scene because he could be waiting a while for treatment at the hospital if he went straight there. I'm sure they didn't kick him out of the ambulance when they were done.

Blue Bean, I agree with you that he could have been waiting a while for treatment if taken to the hospital, but what about all the other potential emergencies that the ambulance team were unable to attend while they were parked there on the street? While they're dilly dallying over the drunk with a head injury, somebody could be collapsing somewhere with a life-threatening heart attack and left to die. That was the part I didn't understand: why were they still parked there ten minutes later?

I had always assumed that a big part of the ambulance (and fire service) system involves getting back to base ASAP after each call, in order to be ready for the next one.

10 minutes isn't that long.

I know of at least one instance where an ambulance with a patient actually attended to another call prior to going back to the hospital. In the end they called another ambulance, the location was out in the country about 15-20 minutes from the nearist hospital.

Maybe one of the paramedics was a trainee.

If there was a slow night, this would be an easy learning opportunity provided by the drunk guy.