Reality Check from me

[petercoulson]

If you take the time to read this please do not treat it as scaremongering, this is reality and this is happening now as you will see in the coming weeks it has been in planning since the start of the outbreak and we can now announce what is being done.

I am aware that most of you know about my ‘hobby’ with St John Ambulance - 43 years and still going so you can imagine I’ve seen many things during this time but nothing like Covid-19 - the world is at war against an invisible enemy and that is how we should treat it. As far as the country goes we are now on an equivalent to wartime footing and too many people do not understand this looking at the gatherings dispersed by Police yesterday, who on earth has a BBQ with 20 people in a street????

 

Reality Check

 

Now, yes NOW the NHS as you have read are stretched - the nature of their work means any staff with sniffles or coughs (it is that time of year) have to self isolate and I know they hate this because they care and their colleagues must take up the slack. What you may not realise is they are way beyond stretched in some cities, London in particular can be 25% down on ambulance coverage at any time that is huge.

Over the coming weeks you will start to see #StJohnAmbulance VOLUNTEERS in emergency departments, ambulances, communities, everywhere. This is not something that has just happened overnight, St John Ambulance consciously took a huge decision 2 weeks ago to cancel ALL event cover (and now commercial training) until July as you can imagine this is worth millions to the charity but it’s what we are. We have some up-skilling to do to help in hospitals and ambulance, our training department has turned out courses in this space of time which is a miracle considering it can take a year to get course approval normally (we have legal as well as technical issues with all our courses which have to be checked and double checked) but again miracles are part of our remit  

 

A majority of these VOLUNTEERS will have their own troubles, they may have been laid off work or even taking 4 weeks emergency leave from their current employer (we have some people in key work) to support our country.

 

From 1st April although we are already doing a considerable amount St John Ambulance will be providing support to 100 #NHS hospitals, providing over 100 #Ambulances per day and the 500 VOLUNTEERS per day helping cover day to day work while the NHS do the skilled work they do - to provide 500 personnel per day we need a pool of 1000+ but our VOLUNTEERS will do this and we will achieve it. You may not see them, it will fluctuate. These volunteers will travel the country in their vehicles to the most severely affected areas at anyone time.

 

The NHS are also recruiting 250,000 people for things like taking well patients back home, moving equipment etc please consider helping them - https://www.england.nhs.uk/2020/03/your-nhs-needs-you-nhs-call-for-volunteer-army/

 

 

To the few treating this as anything but a war: follow current advice and don’t be a moron. Your poor decision will be death for a number of others.

[petercoulson]

p.s. to add it is amazing how much companies that are open have helped as well, Costa for instance give free coffee to uniformed personnel, free food from various places but a huge big UP to BP yes that's right the huge fuel company BP who for the past week and into the future are refuelling ALL ambulances FOC throughout the country as you can imagine that's quite a big saving

[St.Am92]

Respect to you and all the health service.

[keithm]

Utmost respect for all you and St Johns do for the benefit of all.

 

Take care my friend ;-)