A Paramedic Officer from Guernsey has been gaining valuable experience on a placement with specialist paramedics at the UK’s busiest ambulance service. Ross Senior spent four days shadowing a range of different clinical and leadership roles within London Ambulance Service (LAS).
Ross spent time with the London’s Air Ambulance (LAA) Advanced Trauma Team, considered to be one of the most advanced major trauma team in the pre-hospital environment, anywhere in the world, providing hospital-level lifesaving surgery and full anaesthetic procedures at the road side. He also shadowed an advanced paramedic in critical care, giving him the chance to observe the clinical interventions and clinical leadership skills of a senior paramedic response for treating London’s sickest patients.
On one shift Ross was deployed to a significant fire at the prestigious Chiltern Firehouse Hotel, which involved twenty fire appliances and one hundred and twenty firefighters. On that occasion he was working with one of the capitals eight Incident Response Officers, who are dispatched to complex incidents to oversee the ambulance response, manage the scene and co-ordinate with other agencies.
Ross said: “I am incredibly grateful for my time with London Ambulance Service and London’s Air Ambulance, I have gained a valuable insight to their services. The objective was to identify what I could learn to bring back to the ambulance service in Guernsey from both a clinical care and a service delivery perspective. I also had the opportunity to consolidate and develop my operational commander skills. This opportunity has helped me personally and also identify potential areas of improvement for our own service.”
Ross also spent some time in the emergency operations centre (EOC) which takes London’s 999 calls, and dispatches specialist resources. London Ambulance Service deploys between 400 and 450 ambulances at peak times each day. Serving a population of 9 million, it is the busiest ambulance trust in the UK, responding to more than 6,000 calls on a busy day, meaning that the Service responds to almost as many calls in a day as Guernsey’s ambulance service does in a year.
Chris Doyle, Incident Response Officer at London Ambulance Service and Flight Paramedic at London’s Air Ambulance, said: “Having recently worked closely with Ross and his colleagues on Guernsey, it was a pleasure to host Ross here in London.
“Working with various departments within London Ambulance Service and London’s Air Ambulance, we brought together an observation programme that reflected the delivery of critical care and complex incident management within the capital. I’m glad that the time Ross spent here in London was useful and that we continue to work in partnership to improve patient care in both organisations.”
Photos supplied by Ambulance and Rescue Guernsey.
