The tale of three patients

Somewhere in the welsh countryside we were covering an event with one of our Rapid Response Vehicles when we were alerted to an incident that was at the other end of the course from where we were situated.

As a result of the information we were given we turned on the lights and sierns and rapidly made our way to the scene of the accident. We arrived at the road and location we had been told the incident was at only to be told by the people we saw there that there was a second more serious incident further on. We jumped back into the RRV and continued on down the road for a few hundred more yards before we were flagged down to the more serious incident.

Hopping out of the RRV we were told that the casualty was unconscious but breathing, immediately my partner took over attending to the patient while I attempted to contact our control. After several fruitless attempts I advised my partner that I was going down the road to get control on the radio. Within seconds of me leaving the scene I was met on the road by an NHS RRV and pointed them to the incident that we needed them at.

I turned around and returned to the scene with the RRV Paramedic and my attendant gave him a hand over while we waited for an Ambulance to come to take the patient to hospital. Luckily this did not take too long and two arrived after a short period of time, it turned out that the RRV paramedic had already been dealing with another incident further up the road and had been advised of the incident we were at and called the first ambulance for that one and a second ambulance for our incident.

With the arrival of our Ambulance we worked jointly to get the patient quickly packaged up on a spinal board and onto the ambulance. Once this was done we rapidly repacked our RRV and returned to our standby point for the event.

This was our first time working closely with an NHS crew and there was no difficulty working together with everyone treating each other with respect and giving good handovers.