‘Guilt. Sleepless nights. Heartbreak. Bad dreams.’
These are all words that Glenn Carrington has come to associate with his work. He became a paramedic to save lives, but ambulance wait times, overstretched staff and a lack of resources has made that harder than ever.
Glenn, 58, starts his shift in Peterborough and has around six or seven call-outs a day, covering hundreds of miles which will take him through multiple counties such as Hertfordshire, Essex and London.
‘I remember one job…’ Glenn begins to tell Metro. He can’t give away too many details, due to patient confidentiality, but the memory of being too late to save a life still haunts him.
‘Me and my [work] partner had spent seven hours with a patient outside A&E. There weren’t any beds at the hospital. In the end, another crew took the patient so we could get out to another job. It was about 13 miles away.
‘When we got there, a young lady opened the door and said “he’s upstairs, first bedroom on the left. I told him it’s probably a migraine.”
‘I went up and opened the door. I pulled the covers back and he was stone-cold dead. We couldn’t even try to resuscitate him. He couldn’t have been 40, his kids were playing downstairs when we arrived. We’ve had quite a few jobs like that.’
Being ‘too late’ on jobs is an experience burned-out paramedics are facing up and down the country. Across the NHS, a rising tide of 999 calls is causing staff to reach ‘breaking point’. Ambulance crews operate within huge regions and, once they do pick up a patient, are often stuck outside hospitals for hours until a bed in A&E becomes available.
‘We see patients deteriorate in front of us,’ Bryn Webster, a senior paramedic in Yorkshire, tells Metro.
‘People join the ambulance service to help people, to get to patients, but we just can’t seem to do that any more. You give them morphine, you give them what you can while you wait, but they’re still in pain. It’s soul destroying. Colleagues have had situations where patients have died in the back of their ambulance.’
Bryn, 55, adds: ‘Sometimes paramedics dread starting a shift and worry about how it is going to go. We often get to a job and you can feel the tension in the air. They’re thinking “where have you been? You’ve taken hours to get here.”
‘Many crews are at breaking point. I really do feel for the younger staff. When I started, people didn’t really leave the ambulance service until they retired, but they are now because they’re finding it difficult to cope.’
Through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests made exclusively by Metro, the situation is laid bare. In the East Midlands, there were 4,938,908 call-outs via 999 between 2018 and 2023.
Of that, 176,124 category one call-outs [for life-threatening conditions such as cardiac arrest] were unsuccessful in their seven minute response target time. For category 2 call-outs [where the target time is 18 minutes for more minor conditions] nearly a quarter of targets were missed.
The figures are no surprise to Barbara, a paramedic based in the West Midlands.
Racing from job to job – often delayed after waiting outside busy A&E departments – she knows there simply aren’t enough ambulances to reach everyone in time.
‘On the radio, you might hear about a cardiac arrest or other C1 shoutout somewhere else that needs an eight minute response,’ Barbara tells Metro. ‘We all live in the area we work in, that could be one of our relatives.
‘But you have to take a deep breath and get on with it. I feel sorry for the people in the control rooms. They must be looking at maps and thinking “I’ve got limited ambulances, I’ve got some waiting at hospitals, I’ve just taken another out of this area to cover a different area…” They have to juggle, while we deal with one job at a time.’
Barbara and her colleagues routinely work up to ten hours without a proper meal break. Crews used to be able to take a few moments to recover if they’d dealt with a particularly harrowing call-out, now there’s no time.
‘We’re a strange breed, ambulance staff,’ says Barbara. ‘If there’s a demand, we just keep going. If we have a bad job, like cardiac arrest or a bad RTC [crash], we don’t have time to go back to base and have a cup of tea and debrief. We’re just straight out. Mentally, you’re carrying what happened straight into the next job.’
Paul Turner is based in the North-West and feels the same. He started off in operating theatres, moved to A&E then joined the ambulance service as a technician, quickly earning his stripes to be promoted to a paramedic.
‘I define what me and my colleagues do as depressing’, the 42-year-old tells Metro. ‘We’re sent from pillar to post, don’t know if we’ll get a chance to eat and are dealing with patients who are angry because they’ve been waiting so long. It’s not an easy job, it’s not always the glory you see on the television.
‘That is why we are seeing huge amounts of people leaving, going to GP practices, becoming lecturers at university, finding work with the prison service. Would I have joined it if I had known what was coming… I’m not sure.’
Paul has amassed 24 varied years in the NHS. Barbara joined the ambulance service in 2014, as an exciting new challenge after her children grew up. Bryn has made lifelong friends through his work and Glenn recalls his job being ‘brilliant’ when he became a paramedic in 1986. How did things go so wrong?
‘2010 came along, and our world turned upside down’, Glenn says. Austerity was in full force by this point in the UK with an end to Labour rule, and investment into the country’s healthcare had dwindled.
‘GPs closed, hospitals shut and the ambulances service, nurses and porters were privatised. Then after Brexit, we lost doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants and social care workers [as foreign workers either left or could not be recruited]. We never really recovered from that, it was a perfect storm. And then there was Covid, which was life changing for some people and life ending for others.’
People living longer is also putting demand on the already stretched NHS. Paul can drive up to two hours with blue lights on through the Lancashire area to reach jobs at all corners of the county and routinely faces frustrated patients and families when he arrives.
‘The ambulance service is sometimes compared to a football league,’ he explains. ‘Rather than looking at how many people we’ve failed, they [the trusts] go “oh we’re not the worst, we’re in the top half of the table now.” But we’re still not getting to patients at the correct time, so forget the football league.
‘It just can’t carry on the way it is.’
Paul adds that he’s been sent to patients who called 999 for pain such as toothache or diarrhoea. Even for a minor call-out like these, paramedics still have to fill in paperwork with the patient, which again slows down their shift. Blackpool Victoria Hospital is where Paul and his colleagues see the biggest delays, up to 20 ambulances at any one time can be ‘out of action’ waiting to offload.
So, what’s the treatment for the struggling healthcare system? Investment and fair pay, unions say. Currently, starting salaries for paramedics stand at £28,000. That can stretch up to £43,000 depending on experience.
‘Pressure has always been at its most intense in the winter,’ explains UNISON acting head of health Helga Pile. ‘But now every day in the NHS feels like a winter’s day. Fixing social care would help relieve the strain on ambulance services. So too would an early move on wages.’
Meanwhile Rachel Harrison, GMB National Secretary, warns: ‘Until a Government properly invests in the NHS and its workforce, things are just going to get worse.’
While waiting for the big changes, ambulance staff take little steps to make a difference.
It is mentally draining and sometimes you have to sit in a corner and take stock of it all,’ says Barbara. ‘If someone has had a bad job, we buy them a coffee or clean the back of their ambulance.
‘You see a lot of colleagues struggling and it’s not just the ambulance service. At the end of my shift the other day, I went into a shop and bought a box of biscuits to take into A&E.
‘I gave them to a staff nurse and told her “you look how I feel”, and the response from her was “oh my god, someone else can see this.”
‘We do little things for each other, just to keep going really.’
When contacted by Metro, a DHSC spokesman responded: ‘We have seen major improvements in ambulance response times this year, with average waits for Category 2 “emergency” incidents more than 13 minutes faster in 2023/24 than the previous year.
‘We have committed an extra £200 million last year, alongside new ambulances, to further expand capacity and improve response times, and the Government is providing the NHS with record funding of nearly £165 billion a year by the end of this Parliament, alongside record numbers of doctors and nurses.’
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