Incident around 4;00 pm - Saturday - 22nd June 2019 - Ordnance Survey grid ref: SD 408 851
As I returned by the road from a short walk a chap approached from his Land Rover parked in the middle of the road with hazard lights flashing. A cyclist had hit a pothole and come to grief and he was in a bad way - my phone was needed to summon an ambulance. My 999 call was put on hold and it took over five minutes to get through. Our location was remote and not easy to describe and the lady operator seemed incapable of absorbing any information I and the L/Rover chap were giving her. We told her we were on Heights Lane out of High Newton but she couldn't find that village. I have just put it into Google Maps as search and it comes up straightaway - in the end I gave her the OS Grid reference - I think she went off to submit that to someone else. All in all it took about twenty five minutes for her to have sufficient information to direct an ambulance. We then waited for an hour for the ambulance, along with a couple who had also stopped to help. When we have the best mapping and coordinate system in the world why can't we use it more universally, and also employ ambulance coordinators who are familiar with mapping?
PS -
I said it took an hour for the ambulance to arrive. I have just checked my phone and see the initial 999 call was logged at 16:13 and it was 50 mins after when the ambulance arrived. The main point of my concern was the difficulty the operator had in confirming our location rather than the time taken by the ambulance.
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| Red buoy location of incident. The lane is actually named as Heights Lane on the 1:25000 OS map |
Did the cyclist survive?
ReplyDeleteThe Crow - He had various cuts and bruises and remained half sat up on the edge of the road with his back against the Land Rover chap until the ambulance arrived. Fortunately it was warm and sunny and he was not suffering from the usual shivers that arise from shock. I think he had a head injury - he had difficulty in remembering his address when asked and would only speak in response to anything we asked. More than that I can't say.
ReplyDeleteI had a similar experience with Mayday, admittedly many years ago.The operator had great difficulty in locating me which was rather odd since I was in a supermarket carpark in Stirling. Hardly remote. At least I got £10 compensation because they missed their target response time. Of course it’s much more serious when emergency services are required.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that in this day of ultimate technology that we can't communicate a grid reference to the emergency sevices.
ReplyDeleteWe had a similar episode on the moors above Bury trying to report a potential moorland fire. The operator on 999 had no idea of our location, subsequently we could hear the fire engine trying to find the fire.
afoot - I have had the same thing with Green Flag.
ReplyDelete-------------------
BC - In November 2017 I posted at some length about the Green Flag experience and it attracted fourteen comments with a number of similar experiences similar to those mentioned here.
http://conradwalks.blogspot.com/2017/11/two-trips.html