Couple of months ago my friend was working in an institution which was taking care of residents with light to mild disabilities. He was employed in a night shift and his job was more or less to be there and intervene in the case of emergency. He was always in the shift with one other person and for most of time there he was killing time until...
One of the residents went to the bathroom slipped, fell and hit her head on the sink hard. When my friend and his collega got up there, the resident was lying on the floor in a puddle of blood that just kept comming. You need to have in mind that neither my friend nor the person that was working with him don't have any medical training. Ofc they acted instantly one of them started helping the resident and the second one called the ambulance. My friend was the one who called the ambulance. He explained what had happened and asked if they could send a team over to his workplace. The doctor said that they re not comming out for that, explained what to pay attention to and hang up the the phone. In the end everything was fine, fortunately the resident just cut his skin and while it looked ugly it wasn't serious.
When we met for a coffe and he told me the story I was mortified. I asked him "but what did you do when the doctor said they will not be sending an ambulance over?" And he just replied that they helped the resident, cleaned him up, put him to bed and check up on him every half an hour." He asked me in response "Why? What would you have done?"
Well, if I was in his position, I would look up for the symptoms of the heart attack and call again in 5 min from my private phone. When the ambulance would come and they would figure out it was not a heart attack I would tell them that I called and that they refuesed to come and I needed them because a person in my care is potentialy in a life threatening situation and neither me and my colleague are not medicaly educated.
After couple of weeks I got the follow up on the story. He disucussed the events of that night with his boss. The boss praised him for his actions and said that he did everything by the book. He asked him what would have happened if his resident died because of the internal bleedeing or something similar? Nothing, him and his colleague would still get the flying colors for handling the situation because of the way they handled it and the eventual death of the resident wouldn't be their fault. He also asked what would have happened if he got the ambulance to come by missleading them. He would be fired. It seems that even in these kind of situations the priority isn't the life of the person in your care, it is following rules and guidelines and I thought it was the other way around...
After talking to a couple of other people that moved to Denmark from the Balkans, it turns out that all of us had similar experiences with Danish ambulance. They just ain't coming unless you are about to die.
I was curiouse why is it that way. The reason is that Denmark has understaffed hospitals and emergency service. I should correct myself. They are not understaffed, they are minimally staffed, they just have enough personel to keep their hospitals and emergency service running. So if have a medical emergency in Denmark, you might as well save yourself the trouble and skip on the call because they most likely will not come.
No comments:
Post a Comment