This week is International Control Room Week, so we've been getting a behind-the-scenes look at ours.
Today we're hearing from Gail Anderson.
She joined the Emergency Services Joint Control Room a couple of years ago as one of the newly created clinical navigators.
Gail's been telling Amy Griffiths more:
Hi there. I'm Amy Griffiths, and I'm one of the journalists in Banks Radio's Newsroom, and you're listening to Newscast. My name is Gayle Anderson, and I'm a clinical navigator. So after the call takers have taken the 9-9 call, it will be classified as either a cat 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. Cat 1's a serious life-threatening emergency, he's cat 2 as well. Cat 3 or above will come to me, and I will then ring the patient back and talk to them and ask them questions and find out a bit more about what's going on. And then they may or need still need an ambulance, so that'll be dispatched, or they can be referred to the GP, minor injuries, or make their own way to hospital. So there's all sorts of different options that don't just get an ambulance straight away. So I suppose that's to help just establish exactly what requires an emergency response and what perhaps isn't a surgeon. Yeah, basically, so some jobs will come through as a lower category, but actually on speaking to the patient, they're quite poorly. So then that will get upgraded and they'll have an ambulance coming on the blue lights and sirens, and in the other way I could speak to a patient and they're not as poorly as they initially sounded to the call takers, and so then I can redirect them to better care that's more appropriate for them. And it's quite a new role. How long have you been doing this for? It will be two years in February. I was a paramedic. I am a paramedic still. I've been in the ambulance service for nearly 22 years, and then this new role came up and I thought it was quite interesting. So... And having seen both sides of it then, are you finding that having this role really makes a difference to make sure that you're responding to the right people in the right way at the right time? Definitely, 100%. It's not necessarily that you're going to get an ambulance all the time, and it's re-educating people, but making sure that people get the right care at the right time and the right place. Because I think there's a lot of emphasis that's put on to making sure that you do only call 999 in an emergency, but different people have a different interpretation of the word emergency and what's an emergency to them. So having this means that people can still feel validated if they call 999 and they can still feel like they have been helped. 100% definitely. It's nice to help people that let's face it, you ring 999 in times of emergency and when you're panicking and struggling. So sometimes I can reassure people that they have done the right thing, or if they didn't necessarily leave an emergency ambulance, it's still not waste of time because they've got the care they needed. Being a paramedic then, what attracted you to that job and what has kept you in it for so long? I'm crazy. No, I love helping people, basically, always have done. I think that's the care inside of me, I suppose, and I loved being on the front line, going out to people's houses and things like that, but I'm getting old now. And like, so this role came up and it looked quite interesting and I thought, I've been doing it since the beginning. So I kind of helped set it all up and things like that. It's really good. I think it helps. Before this role came up, how aware were you of the control room itself and how it worked? Because obviously you'd be the one getting the deployments from control room, but you wouldn't have necessarily seen the inner workings, I'd imagine. Yeah, no, not really. Obviously you speak to the people on the radio all the time, but it's nice to put faces to names. And yeah, so obviously you don't realise just how much does go on in here. And obviously we've got the police and the fire all in one. So it's interesting to see how busy they all are as well and what goes on in helly. Seeing everyone dispatch ambulances and things like that, it's very interesting. Everyone works very hard. So International Control Room Week, what does that mean to you and what does it mean to you to work here in the control room now? I think it's really good to recognise the hard work that people do. A lot of people would just go, they're just answering phone calls, but they don't. They do a lot more than that. They ask the right questions to make sure it gets as much information as possible as what's going on. And yeah, from my point of view, it's really interesting working up here and it's really nice to see what everyone does. Thank you for making it to the end of the Manx Radio Newscast. You are obviously someone with exquisite taste. May I politely suggest you might want to subscribe to this and a wide range of Manx Radio podcasts at your favourite podcast provider. So our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone. Thank you. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
