I drove patients with NHS delays for a secret ambulance – the public needs to see how bad this is

When the Channel 4 Dispatches team approached me to do a documentary on the ongoing NHS crisis, I already knew I couldn’t stay at my job any longer. As an East Anglian Ambulance Paramedic, responding to emergency calls alongside a paramedic, I have been frustrated with how our patients are coping with delays and understaffing. It also had a detrimental effect on my well-being.

The TV production team asked if I’d like to talk about some of the cases I’ve seen and the problems I’ve encountered. They considered the possibility of someone filming undercover and asked if I would be interested.

I could not talk to anyone about this idea, everything was secret. It took me a week to think: do I really want this? This would probably prevent me from ever working in an ambulance again and possibly doing other medical work. Am I ready to give up the last three years of study?

At the end of the day, I felt it was important that people get to see the situation in the NHS for themselves as truthfully as possible. I felt that I was shooting and conveying what was happening well.

You can evaluate the results yourself when Undercover Ambulances: NHS in Chaos will air on Thursday evening, and before that you can read more about what I filmed I. But I believe we have produced an important documentary that is essential to our nationwide debate on how to strengthen the NHS, save more lives and end so much suffering.

One of the jobs that led me to work on the documentary happened last year. I had a patient with chest pain who called 999. We were late in responding and when we approached him about an hour later it was clear he was having a heart attack.

We acted very quickly and got him to the ambulance within 10 minutes of his arrival. But, like us, his heart stopped. It was such a stressful and traumatic situation for his wife, who stood at the ambulance door and watched.

We managed to revive him once, make his heart beat again and wait for the ambulance to arrive. Unfortunately, he suffered another cardiac arrest. When we took him to the hospital, as soon as he arrived, they called: he died.

He was only in his fifties, so he was still relatively young.

He was a category 2 call, so the ambulance was supposed to arrive at his place in 18 minutes, and he was only 10 minutes from the hospital. If we had approached him immediately after the call, he might still have gone into cardiac arrest due to blockage of an artery in his heart, but at that moment he would have been in the hospital. The local doctors could remove the clot very quickly.

My teammate and I talked about this case all the time. We even talked about it this week. It’s one of those professions that sticks to you and is hard to get rid of.

I joined the NHS as an ambulance assistant in the spring of 2020 as they looked to increase staff due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ever since I looked I wanted to be a paramedic Accident in childhood with grandmother; It seemed like a good way to take this position and help people when the country was in dire need of doctors.

I played this junior role for five months and then I decided I wanted to stay. I applied for an internship at ER and started training in September 2020. I was in class for three months and ended up in the ER in December, just in time for the third wave of the virus and the Christmas quarantine.

That winter was bad, and little has changed since then.

I was quite shocked by the service and how everything is managed, but you get used to it very quickly.

I realize I’ve only seen the system at its worst – when we stack jobs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, when you start your shift at 6 a.m. and still take on tasks that were put off the night before – and I know that everything was wrong. Before the pandemic, things were not so rosy. But, of course, it would be better than now. You hear stories from senior first responders who say this was not the case just a few years ago.

For me to shoot Secret Ambulance, it was very important that everyone was anonymous and the staff protected. I didn’t want my colleagues to be in danger. But ultimately, I believe that showing how patients have been affected outweighs any concerns some people have about a possible invasion of privacy.

I was very nervous on the first day of shooting. I thought I knew how it would feel, but when you actually go with hidden cameras, you are convinced that everyone will see them. I was mentally unprepared and often felt anxious. But the cameras were very good, and no one noticed.

The goal has always been to show that the system is overloaded, and not to reveal individual violations. I really admire all my NHS colleagues. I didn’t want someone who worked with me to get scared when they heard the film and think, “Will this make me look terrible?”

We looked for specific cases of patient harm. If the case did not meet these criteria and they did not wait a long time for an ambulance, I would not shoot them. I didn’t shoot unnecessarily in the patients’ apartments, and in the film we don’t show any intimate moments that might seem voyeuristic.

I turned down my ER role just last week and none of my NHS colleagues knew about this film or my role in it until this weekend. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again, but I hope I don’t get left behind.

Opinions can vary a lot in the run up to the release of the movie, but I hope people keep an open mind about it. I hope you will be grateful for this documentary and that it will bring about changes that will benefit patients and staff.

The tone of the series is very realistic. Doesn’t dramatize anything. It’s very realistic and accurate – meticulous. A lot of work has been put into proving all the points that the film is about and making sure it’s balanced.

There will be those who are furious at the idea of ​​infiltrating hospitals undercover and filming patients and NHS staff without their knowledge. There must be a moral verdict on this. I am well aware that some people may not forgive me and think that this is wrong. But I believe that the public interest in depicting these cases of human suffering outweighs these concerns in general. I did it for the common good.

As I told Rob Hastings

‘Undercover Ambulance: NHS in Chaos is available on Channel 4 and All4 on Thursday, March 9 at 9pm.