Photograph: Martin GodwinParamedics in cities and towns across the country are braced for one of their busiest evenings of the year tonight and paramedic bloggers have been describing how they cope with drunks. They would also like Christmas boozers to know that they are not operating a free taxi service.
Tom Reynolds, writing on that hub of paramedic bloggery that is Random Acts of Reality, relates a not untypical incident a few nights ago when a drunk tried to get into the paramedic car and demand to be "taken up the road". Apparently the man was not very happy when rebuffed.
London Ambulance Service (LAS) describes the penultimate Friday before Christmas as "the start of the festive season" and a big night for office parties. On the equivalent Friday night last year, more than 1,300 emergency calls were taken by LAS between 8pm and 2am the next day, an increase of around 15% compared to the Fridays in previous weeks.
Drunken people whose health is not in substantial or imminent danger seem to have a habit of being a nuisance to the emergency services and LAS was appealing for such people not to tie up 999 services. Lightly grazing your knee after tripping up in your Santa costume is not an emergency.
Another paramedic, Kingmagic, commenting on Reynolds's posting, describes how they were called out and arrived at an address "to find a distraught woman outside screaming 'help me, help him, he's dead!'".
Kingmagic goes on:
"As you are probably aware, this bodes a not good situation. I take in the resus bag, the defib/monitor and the green bag (which is the size of a small European country) and make haste to the front door of the flat.
Once inside I find the patient/casualty ... pissed! And smacked off his tits (medical expression) on coke and [amphetamines] ... Needless to say he did not want to go to hospital."
Other public workers also seem to be having a rough time at Christmas.
On the Walking the Streets blog, traffic warden "Bill Sticker" reports that he had been told to "keep the streets clear" over Christmas. This provides a green light to "book hard, book often and show no mercy", and he is worried at the consequences.
One reader has some advice: "You can probably buy body armour off the internet; might be a bit of a Christmas rush, though."
