Mobile phones

About 10 years ago I got my first mobile phone. It was a great big clunky thing that ran on a now defunct network. Reception was pretty ordinary but it soon wangled its way into my life, quickly becoming an “essential” part of my every day. I soon developed a kind of pre-flight check as I left the house each day that comprised of patting various pockets and saying out loud “wallet….keys… phone”. Now if I forget my phone somewhere I get the same feeling I used to get if I misplaced my wallet; a brief flash of fear followed by the creeping realisation that if I don’t have my phone, then I’m screwed, how will I get all my numbers back?, no one will be able to reach me!

I vaguely remember my life before I grew that digital appendage, before I became slave to the mobile millstone, but what I can’t picture now is how I actually managed to function without it. Australia has one of the highest uptakes of mobile phones in the world. We can’t get enough of them. Just about everyone has one and it is rare that you meet someone who doesn’t. In ambulance this has changed things - a lot. On the plus side mobile phones have given many people access to emergency services a lot quicker than may have been the case in the past.

Now however, all 25 bystanders at an event will now call the ambulance rather than one person heading down to the nearest phone box, so there may be multiple calls to one event. People driving past an accident (or even past someone asleep in their car) will now call an ambulance without actually stopping to see if one is needed. As a result they can’t give the calltaker any details because they are now 10k away down the freeway.

The biggest change that I see in my little pre-hospital window of time is that carloads of concerned relatives will now get to the scene before the ambulance does and then continue turning up while you are there, often blocking the street with their cars making egress impossible. Just when you have calmed down an already elevated and hysterical scene another car will pull up and it’s all on again. I now often find myself deeply concerned with the wellbeing of the convoy of hysterical relatives following the ambulance to hospital – on more than one occasion now I’ve had to pull over the ambulance and walk back to tell the procession to settle down before they cause another accident.

Mobile phone use is insidious and pervasive. I say this because a few days ago for the first time, I used a mobile phone as an assessment tool, I even used it in my handover to the triage nurse at hospital and she didn’t bat an eyelid. My patient was pretending to be unconscious. She had called her case worker and told him she had taken an overdose, he had done the right thing by his client and called an ambulance to attend and make sure she was ok. She was able to walk and talk just fine at the scene but suddenly in the back of the ambulance she was only able to be roused with a lot of a shoulder shaking and a loud voice… until her mobile phone rang. At which point I think she forgot to be unconscious and answered it – asking whoever it was on the other end to “bring me in some smokes will ya”. Then she ended the call and became “unconscious” again. This occurred a total of three times en route.

On arrival at hospital she was still “unconscious” and triage looked at me quizzically until I explained the mobile phone usage. As I went off to do my paperwork I saw the triage nurse heading into the cubical with a sly grin to protect the “unconscious” patients’ airway with a large nasopharyngeal airway. Let’s just say she was not unconscious for long. I headed back out to the car and the first thing I did was check my messages.