Inverness ambulance service

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00:00The hardest part of the job is, there's different aspects.

00:04I say it changes all the time, what the most difficult part of the job is.

00:08Not any days, it's different.

00:13So today for instance, the hardest part of the job was sitting waiting outside hospital.

00:20It's very frustrating and it's the hardest part of today, I would say.

00:27Helping other people, getting straight into hospital, helping the next person, that's quite easy.

00:33But yeah, the hardest part is waiting.

00:35The waiting times at the hospital, it's very challenging and the staff in the hospital are amazing.

00:44They are so helpful, they come out, they try and help us alleviate any symptoms that the patient has.

00:54But I feel, my personal opinion is, the hospital is too small, there's not enough staff,

01:04which impacts again on the staff currently trying to help and alleviate the problems.

01:09And yeah, I think it's just a combination of social care, not having enough people in the community, I would say.

01:23Yeah, I would agree.

01:24And I agree with Heather in the fact that the staff in the hospital currently are incredible and they do help us out a lot.

01:31And if we have any problems, they're very quick to come out and help us or make space for us.

01:39But unfortunately, it's just one of those things at the moment where there is hospital wait times

01:44and hopefully that will change in the future.

01:46I think Rigmore needs to be bigger for the size of Inverness now.

01:51It's not got the capacity to hold the amount of people that are living in Inverness because it's an ever-growing city.

01:59It's the fastest growing city and the hospital is not big enough.

02:03So this morning we had a quite unwell gentleman and that may be a progressive state from not getting to see his GP.

02:16Maybe I'm only surmising, but we see quite a lot of people that they have said,

02:21I've contacted the GP, but I couldn't get an appointment for a fortnight, which is quite a common theme.

02:29And again, if GPs were to go out and see the patients, because I see them on the phones as well.

02:37And I see that as quite beneficial also.

02:39It's like us with our advanced paramedics, they're on the phones triaging, so I can see a benefit in it.

02:45But certain patients need an actual GP visit, but in my personal take, to try and get a GP visit is very difficult.

02:54And that's probably throughout the whole of Scotland, it's not just Inverness, I would say.

03:00Yeah, and I feel like there is a lot of pressure on us when people can't get GP appointments.

03:09And I'm not saying it's the GP's fault, but people don't want to wait for appointments

03:15and people don't want to wait when they're 14th in the queue to even just get through to book an appointment.

03:22So they end up just phoning us.

03:25I mean, all our calls are triaged.

03:27So if the person requires an ambulance, they will get sent an ambulance, depending on what's going on.

03:34So it's a difficult grey area and I don't know how to rectify that.

03:40I mean, that's impacting the hospitals, because they could have got antibiotics earlier, they might have got...

03:51A direct ward admission.

03:52Yeah, absolutely. I mean, GPs have a full range of what they can help with.

03:59We are quite limited in emergency.

04:03They can give out so many drugs, we can't.

04:07So yeah, just maybe getting in there a wee bit earlier might help things along, me personally.

04:14Yeah, I agree.