The Irish Ambulance Service

This is a follow up to my last post called “Media Ethics”. Mayoman left a comment asking if the girl survived the incident. I don’t know whether she did or not. If she did, she would have been left with sever brain damage as her oxygen supply to her brain was cut off for a long time. Perhaps now she is been fed by a tube in her stomach and can’t talk, walk or live any semblance of her previous life. This happens regularly to drug users who overdose. They ended up living the rest of there life in a state institution. I wouldn’t call it living.

The sad thing about it is, if this drug addict lived in the UK she would have had a much bigger chance of survival and she might not have had to go to hospital at all.

The drug narcan is classed as an opioid antagonist. It is used in the emergency treatment of opioid poisoning, heroin is an opioid. When some takes an overdose of heroin their respiratory system is suppressed. That why the girl I found was not breathing and was blue in colour. The treatment for heroin overdoses is to give narcan thorough the vein. Within minutes it reverses the effected of the heron and the person is back to a relatively normal state.

The addict I met was given oxygen by then ambulance crew while on her way to the Mater Hospital. She would have received narcan when in A&E but at that stage she would have been brain damaged. In the UK the ambulance personal would have been able to give the drug straight away at the scene of the accident. Most people then walk away and usually do not come to A&E at all. This saves health services money and most importantly it saves lives.

The Irish ambulance service is not covered to give any drugs or difibulate (electrical shock to the heart. You may see them in ER shouting clear before they use it). All they are covered to do is give oxygen. That is unless they are a cardiac ambulance, in which case they are well trained and equipped. Unfortunately there aren’t many cardiac ambulances around. The ambulances personal welcome any extra training but are not given the responsibility they deserve. So instead the Irish public have to settle for substandard ambulances which provide little more than a taxi service ferrying people to hospital.
Check out the site below for a first person account of been revived from narcan.
www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php