Category Archives: Ambulance

Ambulance, Community Nursing, Health, NHS, Responding to media

Ambulance or Nurse?

3 Comments

The Independant have an interesting story where, due to the shortage of ambulances the plan is to send community nurses first for patients over the age of 65 who have had a fall.

This is a bad idea.

But first, as a quick update on my career, I went from nursing into the ambulance service, and then returned to nursing. At the moment community nursing. So I’ve done both of the roles that the article is talking about.

The ambulance role is very much different from community nursing. When a community nurse sees a patient, it is not in an emergency situation. If you have a leg ulcer, or cancer, or a surgical wound that’s not healing as it should, then the community nurse is ideally placed to see to your needs. However if you have fallen and either can’t get up by yourself, or have broken your hip, then what you need is an ambulance.
This isn’t to say that comunity nurses don’t already keep people from going into hospital. Community Treatment Teams (CTTs as they are known in my patch, your acronym may vary) work hard to stop people with chroninc and acute conditions from needing to visit A&E. Unfortunately trauma is something entirely different to the heart failure, asthmatic and palliative patients that these teams see.
An ambulance crew are trained to deal with these acute traumatic incidents. Community nurses are not (as an aside there was some research about how nurses are really bad at first aid. And they are bad).

The plan is for a nurse to give a painkiller, including morphine, and then wait for the ambulance. At least I assume they are supposed to wait. I know I’m not going to give Doris with her fractured hip 10mg of morphine and then leave her on the floor. A big problem with this is that, as a community nurse, my day is already packed with patients (and as the government wants to kick more patients into the community, that will only increase). It is more common than not that I work through my lunchbreak, just in order to do the bare minimum for my patients. Community nurses do not have the time to play at ambulances.

What happens if the nurse overestimates the amount of morphine to give the patient, they’ll need a BVM, and training in how to use it and naloxone and how to give it, maybe some other drugs to counter potential bradycardia. And remember, a nurse doesn’t then have the option to load the patient into the back of an ambulance and whizz off to hospital. They’ve got to sit there.

And then who is going to supply the morphine, where will it be kept? Morphine is a Controlled Substance and needs to be kept in a special locked cupboard inside another locked cupboard. Who is going to provide a stock of morphine just in case it’s needed.

And then there is…

…but you get my point.

This is, yet again, an example of short-term thinking to patch up huge holes in the NHS that have been caused by successive governments. Both the ambulance services and the community nursing trusts need more money, and odd blue-sky thinking by people who are several steps removed from actually meeting patients is not the way.

Ambulance, Health, Politics

It’s Not Rocket Science

2 Comments

It is really quite simple – there aren’t enough ambulances to meet demand, why there aren’t takes a little more thought (but not much).

Take for example this story about a cyclist waiting two hours to go to hospital, and then needing a helicopter to pick them up.

A cyclist who broke his hip in an accident was forced to spend two hours lying on the roadside before being transported in the back of a furniture van flagged down by police because there were no ambulances available.

“I was there for a long time – two hours – and in a lot of pain because I have a low resting heartbeat which means I couldn’t be given morphine. It was raining and I was getting really cold and shivery.

“Eventually more paramedics arrived with blankets but I was still lying on the roadside and I was told I wasn’t even on the waiting list for an ambulance because there was a shortage.

“The paramedics were really kind and professional and caring but they were all saying this was ludicrous and down to budget cuts.”

In despair, the paramedics called for an air ambulance but were told the nearest one, in Essex, couldn’t take off because of high winds. A second helicopter from Norfolk was scrambled but couldn’t land in the road because of safety problems so had to touch down a mile away from Mr Knight.

“A policeman flagged down a passing furniture van driver and asked him to take me,” said Mr Knight.

Now add in the recent report showing that there just aren’t enough beds in hospital, and if there are enough beds then patients coming into the emergency department can’t be sent to the wards. This means the the emergency department gets full and they haven’t the room to take a patient off of an ambulance stretcher. This means the ambulance spends longer waiting and can’t turnaround for another call.

The number of people left waiting in ambulances outside accident and emergency (A&E) departments for more than half an hour has risen by over 100,000 in just two years, raising fears over the NHS’s ability to safely achieve the government’s aim of £20bn in efficiency savings.



Realise that ‘efficiency savings’ in real english is ‘cuts‘.

So, not enough beds means that ambulances have to wait longer to get clear of hospitals which results in increased waiting times for ambulances.The solution to this problem is apparently to close some emergency departments so that waiting times will get longer.

The results of a public consultation on the closure of four hospital accident and emergency units in north-west London have been released. The findings show support for ending services at Charing Cross, Central Middlesex, Hammersmith and Ealing.

I despair, I honestly do.

Ambulance, Urgent Care

Without Meaning

8 Comments

I’m having trouble saying who I am at present.

It was easy when I worked on the ambulances – I was ‘ambulance worker’, the job defined me completely. The shift work made me sleep at weird hours and be grumpy when I was awake. I walked around other people’s homes as if they belonged to me and I raced along the road on blue lights. I was part of a clique of people who had seen things and done things that most people never even think about, the camaraderie and the in jokes, the swearing, the ‘us vs. them’ attitude. My job defined who I was.

Then I left the ambulance service (just in time, as my crumbling back gave me numb legs and I couldn’t see myself carrying 20st patients any more) and I became a nurse practitioner. There is something about being a nurse practitioner that just doesn’t give me meaning like when I was working on an ambulance. Is it because it is less stressful? Is it because the camaraderie is not as strong? Is it because, instead of saving lives and delivering babies, I’m now telling people how to deal with sore throats and runny noses?

I’m no longer described and defined by my job. ‘Ambulance worker’ was my super hero identity, ‘Nurse practitioner’ is just a job. When I’m not at work I’m not ‘off duty’ any more – I’m just not at work. Working on the ambulances defined me but being a nurse doesn’t seem to fulfil that same role.

I’m not sure that this is a bad thing, but I think it is something that has been worrying away at the back of my mind for a while. I’m wondering if it’s come to the front of my mind because my old blog Random Acts Of Reality has finally been deleted from the internet (due to Blogware shutting down). I have the whole site in a vaguely unusable export format – but something that was such a large part of my life has now gone, and I’ve nothing new to replace it with.

Maybe I need to find something…

Ambulance

Death Rate in London to Increase

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decimate [ˈdɛsɪˌmeɪt]

vb (tr)

2. (Military) (esp in the ancient Roman army) to kill every tenth man of (a mutinous section)

 

When I heard the news that the London Ambulance Service was going to reduce it’s frontline staff by 560 people my first thought was that this would meet the true definition of ‘decimate’, to remove one in ten men.

I was wrong.

They will be removing a sixth of frontline staff.

From the LAS own press release – 3433 staff provide direct patient care,  560 posts will go.  That’s 16%.

This physically makes me sick.

I’m going to, for the sake of brevity, ignore the way in which staff will be removed from post – let us just assume that it will all be from natural wastage and that no-one who wants to keep their job will be made redundant.

Let me remind you that for every year in living memory the number of people calling for ambulances increases – last year the LAS attended 4.5% more calls than the year before, and this rise is typical. I suspect that this rate of change will only increase faster because poverty is a big cause of poor health – and more people are going to be poor in the future.

I’d also like to say that next year there is going to be a little sporting event called the Olympics – and I suspect that the LAS is already in panic mode without these ‘cost improvements’.

—–

Let’s look at that number of 16% frontline staff being cut, that is roughly equivalent to one ambulance removed from each and every one of the 70 ambulance stations around London.

Or it may be that of the 70 ambulance stations the cost savings cuts will close 11 of them, leaving just 59 stations untouched.

However, I think that these cuts will go much deeper than this – there are going to be far fewer ambulances on the road than this 16% figure would suggest, and this will be because there will be a ‘new way of working’.

—–

When you call an ambulance at the moment you get a big yellow van that can take you to hospital, if it sounds serious then they also send a little yellow car in order to (a)stop the government mandated target time clock, and (b)start treatment before the big yellow van arrives.

This will change. In the future, when you call for an ambulance, a big yellow van will not be sent. Instead the little yellow car will arrive and see if you really are sick enough to need a proper ambulance to take you to hospital.

But where will the increased need for people to drive the little yellow cars come from? Well, they will be taken off of the big yellow vans to be put on a little yellow car. This will reduce the number of ‘proper’ ambulances on the road even further.

The danger in this is twofold.

(1) Will there be the training, support and education for ambulance staff to ‘medically discharge’ while in the patient’s home?

(2) Will these solo staff responders be safe when they either refuse to send a proper ambulance, or have to keep apologising for there not being an ambulance to send when surrounded by upset and possibly angry patients and relatives?

Taking the training and support point first – even as an ex-nurse with sixteen years working in various medical emergency fields, until I started working as a nurse practitioner, I would still be nervous about leaving patients at home and I have had more training then most of the people who drive ambulances. Also, in my experience, the in-service training and updating of skills was very poor.

This is without wondering if of the 330 ‘management and support’ roles that are going, a sizeable chunk of them will be in the training department.

The LAS will be looking to sack many of the staff that have been working there the longest – they cost more than an inexperienced new person. Sacking people for making a clinical error after being forced to work outside their scope will be a booming business.

(I have heard a rumour that ‘Untoward Clinical Incidents’ doubled last year – if I were a journalist it might make for an interesting Freedom of Information request…)

So, you will have staff working outside their scope of experience, worried for their jobs, being sent to decide if you really do need an ambulance – anyone who has been in the job for any length of time will decide that everyone will need to go to hospital in order to protect their own career as well as the life of the patient.

So you will need the same number of ambulances.

Secondly – imagine yourself surrounded by a large, noisy, scared and potentially violent group of relatives, maybe you are in a crack-house, maybe you are attending a case of domestic violence, maybe you are at the house of a child who is dead. You are on your own. You are trying to tell the people present that either they do not ‘deserve’ an ambulance, or that there just isn’t an ambulance to send because they are all too busy.

How do you think those people will react?

All the interpersonal training skills in the world will not save you from that one person wanting to take their frustration out on you.

So, expect to see ambulance crew assault on the rise – and remember, if you are assaulted and off sick they can still discipline and sack you for taking too much time off sick – I know because I was threatened with it myself.

—–

One part of the LAS that won’t be cut will be the PR and communications department – they are going to be spending more and more time responding to reporters asking for information of patients being ‘left to die’, as well as sending out the following template press release.

The London Ambulance Service would like to express their condolences to all those affected by the circumstances surrounding the death of _______________. As a service we have taken the comments of the coroner’s office very seriously and believe important lessons have been learned.

—–

So, what is the solution?

If I were Peter Bradley I would stop pretending that everything was going to be ‘just fine’. I would not call these cuts ‘cost improvements’, I would publicly call Dave Cameron the lying bastard that he is. I would do that every day as loudly as I could to as many people as possible.  I would encourage the unions to take ‘work to rule’ action in order to embarrass the government.  At the bottom of every ‘condolences’ press release I would add ‘Unfortunately the government have forced us to cut services and while we are trying the best we can we are not being funded enough to provide the service that people expect‘.

If I were CEO I would resign, while trying to cause as big a fuss as possible, because these cuts will make any CEO responsible for more deaths than all the serial killers of the UK combined.

And that’s not how I’d like to be remembered.

If I were a member of road staff right now, and I had another trade, I’d be looking to get out of ambulance work as soon as possible – the pay is poor, conditions are going to get worse and the right wing press will paint you as feckless and lazy. Get out while you can because, no matter how bad things are now, it’s only going to get worse over the next five years.

And MPs? Just remember this, the next time one of you is stabbed – there might not be an ambulance to come and save you.

Ambulance, From Random Acts Of Reality

Endings

19 Comments

It's been two months since I last blogged, and I think that this is nature's way of telling me that this blog is finished.

When I started writing this I never thought that it would take off in the way that it did – two books, a radio play, opportunities to speak to lots of people at once and of course the upcoming TV series.

But all good things come to an end and, since leaving the London Ambulance Service, my life has settled down somewhat.

Which means that I have far less to write about the ambulance service, which is what this blog very quickly became about.

So I've decided to put this blog into a 'Deep Freeze'. So the links, posts and everything else will remain here, but I won't be updating it any more. In a fortnight I'll close down the commenting system so that I don't have to spend the rest of my natural life removing spam comments.

The reasoning behind this is that this blog was supposed to be about anything – but due to it taking off as an 'ambulance blog', I felt that I was 'cheating' if I wrote something that wasn't about working on the ambulances. Now I no longer work full time on an ambulance the number of ambulance posts will decrease to almost nothing.

I'm thinking that it's for the best if this blog stays true to being about my time on the ambulances, and I start afresh somewhere else.

I shall be moving my presence on the internet over to Brian Kellett (dot) net, where I plan to write blog posts about whatever interests me. This means that if you are only interested in ambulance related blogposts as opposed to me writing about whatever tickles my fancy, this is where we part company.

For day to day things I shall be continuing to use twitter @Reynolds

—–

If you want to read about ambulance stuff, there are a few blogs out there that I read and you might be interested in.

Insomniac Medic blogs while working for the London Ambulance Service – rather him than me.

Then there is 999Medic, Mark Glencorse, who is much more energetic than me. He's also on a mission to change ambulance services for the better.

From across the pond is Ambulance Driver Files, whose politics I almost completely disagree with. He is a top bloke and has a wry sense of humour.

And finally but not least there is Rogue Medic, another American, who posts incredibly well thought out articles about making EMS better, mostly by the use of science.

—–

So, that's that. Time to move on to Brian Kellett (dot) net, where I shall be writing about things that interest me – not just ambulance related stuff.

And if this is farewell, then may I wish you safe travels, and I hope that while you've known me I've entertained you, and maybe made you think a little.

Ambulance, Blogging, From Random Acts Of Reality

My Last Shift

10 Comments

I would like to start with an apology.

A little while ago, I asked the question 'What is it that makes an ambulance'. I then went on to inform you that the only equipment that an ambulance requires is a defibrillator and a bag-valve-mask. I may have made the suggestion that this shows the priority that the LAS has on patient care.

But I must apologise, for I made a mistake.

You don't need the defibrillator.

—–

Yes, on my final shift I found myself on an ambulance without a defibrillator, going to calls of elderly patients with chest pain. Then our tail lift stopped working, so there was no way to use the stretcher.

We we refused our request to go 'unavailable' in order to return to station in order to get replacement kit.

So the last shift continued my tradition of trying to give good healthcare despite management policies.

—–

The patients were also a fair mix of the normal sorts of patients I've spent the last eight years going to – a fall, a drunken and abusive alcoholic, a homeless chap with chest pain, a runny nose, and two hospital transfers.

My last call was for one of those transfers, an elderly chap that the doctors at a local hospital suspected was having a heart attack that we blue-lighted to the heart-attack centre.

They didn't think that he was having a heart attack, but given his long, complicated and somewhat obscured medical history I still think that the local hospital did the right thing.

—–

So, no bangs, no whimpers, just a continuation of what my shift has been like since I joined the service.

I'm going to hold off on writing about my new job for a while until I get settled in a bit, I think that it's important that I get the lay of the land, and besides, it's better to reflect than immediately report.

I've still got a few things to write about the ambulance service sitting in my notepad, so that will keep me going for a bit.

(Plus I need to work on a new banner for the blog, maybe a new layout and who knows what else…)

Ambulance, From Random Acts Of Reality

Nobody Likes Us

10 Comments

I've not been writing because I've been incredibly busy of late, working my normal LAS shifts (my last shift is on Friday, three more to go and, yes, I'm counting the hours), plus the paperwork for my new job (currently filling out the second Criminal Records Check form because I was sent an out of date one earlier), as well as all the normal stuff that keeps us busy, like laundry and shopping and making sure my Sky+ box doesn't get filled up with too many programmes.

Hopefully this will all soon change, giving me more time to put finger to keyboard.

—–

I've been talking to a lot of people about my upcoming change in jobs to the local hospital – both ambulance and nursing staff, and the thing I've noticed is that sometimes people just don't get on.

For example – I explain to one of my ambulance friends that I was talking to Nurse Smith about my upcoming job change and that she was very happy for me. 'Ergh', says my ambulance colleague, 'Nurse Smith? I can't stand her…'

And I find that on both sides, nurses and ambulance staff that I consider good clinicians and good people looked on with some disdain.

I think I've worked it out.

It's because we don't know what each other does.

Many of the nurses that aren't liked by ambulance crews are those nurses that expect more. They forget that, for a great number of us, our training is 16 weeks in a classroom. We've never been taught 'reflective practice', or how to read a research paper, or learnt the meaning of the word 'holistic'.

These nurses get annoyed when an ambulance worker doesn't know about a certain obscure disease, or something happens that highlights something that was lacking in our initial training.

And if nurse gets annoyed, then you can be sure that the ambulance worker concerned will get annoyed as well.

On the flip-side, there are the nurses who think that we are little more than removal drivers – we pick people up, wrap them in a blanket, and take them to hospital. They can't see the reason why we bring to hospital some of the dross that we do (personal favourite call from last night – '33 year old male with cold'). These are the nurses who have asked me in the past 'can you do a blood pressure'.

To be fair, that is from a ward nurse, A&E nurses have a better idea of what we do, but can still have some strange ideas of what our work is really like. Some don't realise that we refer vulnerable children and adults to social services. They may not realise exactly how many patients we leave at home (endless panic attacks, diabetic hypoglycaemia and epileptics). They also may not know that if someone wants to go to hospital then we can't refuse them.

—–

It's not particularly anyone's fault – certainly it works both ways, ambulance staff don't really understand the pressures that A&E nurses are under. I know that I have a privileged knowledge, coming from both worlds.

What is annoying is that the solution is very simple – nurses spending some observation shifts with ambulance staff, and ambulance staff spending some time in A&E, but it'l never happen because of those self-same pressures. Ours to hit eight minute arrival targets, and A&E to cope with understaffing and having too many patients to deal with.

And our free time is precious – spent sleeping rather than volunteering to go rattling around London in an ambulance, or being asked to do ECGs on endless patients in A&E.

Besides, it's not that important to deal with little episodes of misunderstanding brought about by not knowing each other's jobs.

Is it?

Ambulance, From Random Acts Of Reality

CCTV And Drunkeness

9 Comments

'Male, collapsed in street – cannot see if he is breathing'.

Once more I found myself speeding towards a drunk in the street. It's *always* a drunk in the street, except of course on the one occasion when we don't whizz to scene – then they will be dead.

The Sod's Law of collapsed or deceased patients.

Like many of the drunk calls, we also had the information that 'caller will not approach patient', of course not, because the 'possibly dead' person is drunk, smelly, and possibly violent. That, after all, is why we are called to wake them up and move them on.

In this case however, it was much more reasonable, the caller was a CCTV operator.

So we rolled up and found our man snoring gently in the middle of the pavement. Hopping over the fence between us and the patient I went up to him and woke him up.

The man was apologetic (or at least I think he was apologetic, but then sheepish smiles and a bowed head are pretty universal despite the patient not speaking English). He then walked off to catch a train.

I looked around to see which CCTV camera had 'caught' him, and spotting the only one I could see I gave the camera a thumbs up, and then mimed drinking from a bottle.

The operator obviously got the message as the camera nodded up and down in acknowledgement.

Ambulance, From Random Acts Of Reality, Things That Amuse Me---

Last Night

12 Comments

I recently had my last ever night shift, I would have written abut it earlier but the effects of the shift work had basically knocked me on my arse and made me incapable of doing anything except sleeping and dozing on the sofa.

It was, ultimately, a not unusual shift – no jobs that leapt out as being anything out of the ordinary.

My first job was to a woman who was intensely isolated because of her being unable to speak English, the only person she knew was her daughter who has a full time job. We were called because the woman was 'behaving strangely'. We arrived with the police to find her crying on the floor. We did the only thing that we could do, take her to hospital to see a psychiatrist.

It was handy to have the police there, because initially the woman wanted to refuse to come, but as she was distraught and had threatened suicide it was important that she see a professional.

The next job was to someone who'd been minding their own business and then been punched in the face with a knuckleduster. Often you can tell when someone is hiding something (because, let's face it, a lot of assaults in my area have a reason behind them. Not a good reason mind you, but there is normally a reason). In this case he didn't seem the type to be in a gang, he didn't appear to be a drug dealer and I don't think that he was secretly sleeping with someone else's girlfriend.

We took him to hospital in order to rule out a fracture of his facial bones.

The next patient had been indulging in some cocaine, some cannabis and a lot or alcohol. So had his friend. We had been called because he was 'off his legs', or as it was described to us 'he had been on his hands and knees like a dog'. I may have resisted the urge to ask if he had taken to barking.

As he got to the doors of the ambulance he let forth a huge spew of vomit, simultaneously passing flatulence. 'Better out that in' goes the old saying, and truly it is better out than in, as in outside the ambulance and not inside it where I need to mop it up.

During this he had developed a bellyache, so we assessed him and took him to hospital where, a few hours later, he was feeling much better.

(Seriously, is Red Bull and whiskey a sensible drink?)

Our next patient. Oh dear, our next patient…

The short version is that she was faking a panic attack in a pub. Once more I'm left wondering why people think that they can fake medical conditions in front of people who've seen them all before. This patient was very trying as she refused to get onto the ambulance (until she realised that her audience were bored and going home), then she alternated between not telling me anything and telling me about everything.

At the hospital she refused to get out of the ambulance until I had sweet talked her, then she refused to enter the hospital, then she refused to go to the toilet while crying that she needed to pass urine.

She was put into the waiting room (eventually) where she then argued with one of the nicest nurses in the unit…

I'll be the first to admit that it was very hard for me to remain the consummate professional that I am.

The last I saw of her she started by telling her new audience that her four year old child had called the ambulance (rather than the bar manager who'd actually called us), and that everyone was against her. She then went on to try and damage a police car before drunkenly disappearing off to the local bus stop.

I think it's called 'personality disorder'.

A much simpler job followed – a man who was stuck in the bath. The FRU had got there before us and had already solved the problem. We didn't even see the patient, as he'd gone to bed, so we caught up on some gossip with the FRU responder and made ready for our next job.

A nightmare job. Not because of the patient (who was confusingly suffering from a mish-mash of symptoms that had us blue-lighting her into hospital). No, the nightmare was the spider on the wall of the staircase that was the size of my hand. Garden spider or escaped tarantula in disguise, who knows what it was?

One of the elderly relatives saw the look on my face and managed to dispose of the creature in a piece of kitchen roll – as he walked into the kitchen with the ferocious monster I listened out for any screaming as the spider broke free of the paper and tore the old man's throat out…

An interesting job as there was a mix of heart problems, probable sepsis and undiagnosed diabetes – the best thing for the patient was for us to treat her symptoms as best we could and get her into hospital as quickly as possible so that the doctors could sort things out.

And a nice family, adept at dealing with the sorts of giant spiders only seen in horror movies.

Then I had a nap for twenty minutes in the passenger seat of the ambulance as, for a few minutes at 5 a.m, it seemed that people were getting some sleep and not filling their time calling ambulances.

Our final job was a transfer of a patient from our local hospital to the heart specialist unit. A nice patient, a nice family member and an uneventful journey finished the night off lovely.

—–

And that was it, my last night shift. I drove home with a huge smile on my face – no more would I need to feel sick in the stomach after a long night shift, nor would I need to batter my body clock into submission any more.

No more night shifts means that I will be able to rejoin the human race, no longer will I have the constant feeling of jetlag dragging me back.

As I write this I have another stupidly big grin on my face and an urge to dance a little jig around the room.

Ambulance, From Random Acts Of Reality, News

Done

61 Comments

To whom it may concern,

I wish to resign from my post as an EMT-3 in the London Ambulance Service. If possible I would like to go onto a bank contract so that I may work the occasional shift.

I would appreciate it if you could tell me my last working day as soon as possible as I am moving elsewhere in the NHS and they would like to know the earliest date that I can start.

Many thanks in advance.

Brian Kellett

—–

I handed this letter to my immediate boss today.

People who follow me on Twitter will have already heard that I have a new job, one that I'm due to start in approximately one month. In one month's time I shall be going back to nursing where I am taking a post as an Urgent Care Nurse Practitioner at Newham hospital.

I've been led to this by a number of factors, a majority of things that have pulled me towards a career change as well as more than a few things that have pushed me away from the LAS.

My AOM described it best when she gave me my reference, she said that I was bored and that I needed new challenges. We both agree that in most cases the job that we do turns our brain to mush.

So, I'm going back to nursing because I want to develop my clinical skills, I want to learn new things, I want to be more responsible for providing people with the best healthcare that I can.

It's pretty much impossible to do this within the LAS because, for example, our ECP (Emergency Care Practitioner – our top clinically trained people) programme is effectively being shut down. There is nowhere to progress to and… well… you have been reading all about it on this blog for the past few years.

—–

So, some big changes – one of which being that I'm going to go to writing under my real name, Brian Kellett, rather than the helpful pseudonym of Tom Reynolds. At the moment I'm in the process of changing this on all the social network profiles that I can remember belonging to.

If you take a look at the top of this very blogpost you should see that it no longer says 'By Reynolds'.

As for this blog… well… I'm unsure of what form it's going to take in the future. WIll I be still writing about ambulance stuff? Will I be documenting my journey into urgent care? Will I just natter about whatever interests me at that moment in time? I'm not quite sure. Certainly I'm not going to stop writing and in fact, later today, I'm heading into town to have drinks and a chat with a friend about something we are planning together.

So I'll keep blogging, but I'll no longer be the 'ambulance blogger', I'll be 'that annoyingly nerdy blogger', which I think puts me in good company.

—–

So there you go, a change in career, a change in direction, a change (of sorts) of name. I'm looking forward to it and will be writing about it in the coming weeks.

It would be a lie to say that I'm not at least a little bit nervous about this, but nervousness is just a form of excitement – and while this is a big step for me it's one I'm looking forward to taking.