It’s 25 years since Tracy Nicholls decided to take a part-time job working for the patient transport service (PTS) in the East of England. At home with young children, she knew she wanted to do a job that involved helping people, and when she saw an advertisement for a role that involved driving people to and from the hospital, she thought it sounded right up her street. As soon as she started the job, she realised: “This is me. I’m done for life now. They’ve got their hooks into me and I don’t want to let go.”
The East of England ambulance service NHS trust (EEAST) covers a vast geographical area that takes in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. Its non-stop service operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and each day it handles 3,600 emergency calls in its emergency operations centres at Bedford, Chelmsford and Norwich. As well as responding to emergency calls, it provides non-emergency patient transport services (where Nicholls began her career) to and from treatment centres. It also operates two hazardous area response teams and a resilience and emergency planning department that works with critical care charities and community volunteers to respond to emergency situations. Finally, it operates income-generating commercial services, such as first aid training.
These days, Nicholls still works for EEAST, but as director of clinical quality and improvement. The career path that led her to that role is a testament to the opportunities available in the organisation. Her part-time driving job led her to full-time work on the high dependency unit, which involved going out on ambulance calls with a paramedic. After nine months, she trained as an emergency medical technician, which progressed naturally towards training, a year later, as a paramedic.
Nicholls has enjoyed all the jobs she’s done for the service. “What I loved was the variety,” she says of her first role. “You didn’t know if you were indoors or outdoors. You could have the same patients every week for six weeks and everything would be different every time you picked them up. It felt so rewarding.” Simple things such as picking the rugs off a patient’s floor, so they didn’t fall over, or driving them to their chemotherapy or dialysis appointment on time “gives you a real sense of satisfaction”, she says.
When she took the paramedic job, Nicholls thought it would be the “pinnacle” of her career. She worked in a busy station in Luton, becoming a station manager, so that as well as going out on ambulances, she was managing staff and dealing with operational problems such as fleet breakdowns.
From there, she moved to a position training other paramedics, before returning to ambulance work supporting clinicians on calls involving more serious incidents. The next big step came when she moved into clinical governance, leading to a job as deputy director of clinical quality and improvement that, she says, used “every skill and attribute I’ve learned over the years”. Eighteen months ago, she took on the post of director, a board-level role usually given to a director of nursing or medicine. Nicholls admires the fact that EEAST were “brave” enough to offer the role to a paramedic, and uses her position to represent the staff, asking: “What would this decision mean to me if I’m sitting on a station? How would this decision about our fleet or finances affect me as a paramedic?”
As you might expect of a large organisation, EEAST offers a wide range of roles. These include ambulance care assistants, call handlers, dispatchers, patient transport drivers, emergency care support workers, emergency medical technicians, students and graduate paramedics. Each job includes excellent paid holiday entitlement and entry to the NHS pension scheme. Once in the service, as Nicholls’ experience shows, there are plenty of opportunities to undergo professional training and progress to higher roles.
Because the service covers such a diverse area, there is no shortage of variety. As Nicholls explains: “We’ve got Essex, which borders London, we’ve got rural communities such as Norfolk. We have airports, heavy industry and agriculture. We also have a transient population because of tourism – in the summer, the whole population of Norfolk and the Essex coastline swells and demand goes up.”
Nicholls firmly believes that working for EEAST is the “best job in the world”. She adds: “You are invited into people’s homes and places of work in their darkest hour, and when you walk in people relax, and that’s when we go up a gear and say: ‘OK, we’re here to help.’ The extensive training really just kicks in and you’re able to deal with very different things, from road traffic accidents to a heart attack, and from a baby being born to a diabetic coma. Explain to me where else you’d get that amazing variety.”
Throughout it all, she says, you are working as part of a close-knit team – an “incredible collegiate organisation”. There is plenty of banter and enjoyment of the “funny side of the job, the bizarre and the strange”.
And then there are occasions when everyone works together to save a life. Nicholls remembers attending a severe road traffic collision in which a man was injured so badly the only thing he could say was his wife’s mobile phone number. She recalls how many people were at the scene: “You saw your fire service colleagues were right by your side helping you, your police colleagues were right there, sorting everything out, the air ambulance came and gave extended skills we couldn’t give.” When the man recovered and was discharged from hospital, he couldn’t remember a thing. “That’s OK,” says Nicholls. “That’s a first-class result where everybody comes together because one life is worth it. One life is always worth it.”
