Doctors...

Over the years I have worked with many individuals and have seen some excellent people but at the same time I have come across individuals who are dangerous.

I was on duty with a crew of two others covering a rugby match on a fine sunny day. During the match one of the players was observed by us to have taken a bad kick to the head who then walked over to us at the ambulance stumbling a fair bit.

We quickly examined him and it was very obvious that he had a head injury and we were preparing to place him onto a spinal board with a standing take down when the club doctor waddled out and ordered us to stop what we were doing. He then proceeded to do his own "examination" of the patient which amounted to feeling his neck for any spinal tenderness etc. After this 10 second check he says to the player, "your fine, on you go and play". All three of us looked at each other in surprise and the player looks at me and asks me what I thought. I simply said to the player "Its up to you what happens, we cannot force you to go to hospital however we strongly recommend you do go based on what we saw". At this stage the doctor interrupted me and told the player not to mind us and to go back on and play.

The player reluctantly walked back towards the lines man and from there onto the pitch. To our horror he started vomiting onto the pitch however the doctor refused to allow us to take the player off the pitch and take him to hospital for the assessment he genuinely needed.

Eventually after another 25 minutes of playing the match finally ended. All through the 25 minutes we could see that the player was struggling and quite slow to follow the ball around the pitch. As soon as the final whistle went we went straight over to them and asked them how they felt. He confirmed that he felt 10 times worse than he had felt when he was with us earlier and agreed to go to hospital with us there and then.

As quickly and safely as we could we brought him over to the ambulance and placed him onto a spinal board and onto the stretcher. As I closed the ambulance door I saw the doctor waddling as fast as he could towards us, seeing this I slammed the door shut and shouted through to the driver to drive. He quickly realised why I wanted us moving and drive off leaving the doctor behind us in the gathering dust.

We repeated the patients vital signs on the ambulance while taking him to the hospital to find that he had a very high blood pressure and a very slow pulse indicating a potentially serious head injury based on what we had seen happen to him. We were very surprised that he had managed to last until the end of the match.

On arrival at the hospital he was quickly rushed into the resusitation room and very quickly they organised various tests for him praising us for recognising the potential seriousness of the situation and under their breaths muttering about useless GPs who forced players to play on.

The good news is the player suffered no long lasting effects from the delay in getting treatment but things could have been a lot worse....