There's a lot of detail in Ryan Tubridy’s compelling chat with outgoing National Ambulance Service director Martin Dunne, but surely the most shocking revelation is the fact that the difference between the siren on the old white ambulances going nee-naw or just nee actually had nothing at all to do with the relative seriousness of the emergency, but was rather down to a design flaw.
"You used to have the sirens go bee-baw or nee-naw and halfway up the road it’d usually change from nee-naw to nee."
And that was what so many people thought was a cardiac ambulance or some other specific emergency that needed its own siren sound, including Ryan, who asks if there was anything to be read into the nees and the naws. Apparently not:
"They used to fill full of flies, you see, on the roof because they were a kind of a funnel going the wrong way, so you’d lose out a bit, you’d lose half your impact on arrival, you know that sort of way?"
Martin Dunne is a very affable guest, full of chat and stories, but listeners need to pay attention because he’s not going to wait for slow ears – he wants to say what it is he has to say quickly. The director of Ireland’s Ambulance Service has been at the frontline throughout the pandemic and it’s been a steep learning curve, but the patient is still and always has been the most important consideration:
"Ambulance crews across the country, once it comes to do with patient care, and being a positive impact on a patient, or doing something to help somebody, we’ll mobilise."
Along with so many other frontline workers, ambulance crews had to deal with multiple layers of PPE, come up with plans to cope with logistics and bring in lots of new equipment.
"We had to look at a new way of working is correct, Ryan, very quickly because again, our crews were out there, along with other members of the HSE, etc, on the frontline, meeting people, going into locations a lot of people had left, but we were still going in, if you know what I mean, to do a swab or a test, or whatever it was, or to treat a patient because that’s what it’s about – people still get sick, still have car crashes, etc, and we have to be able to treat them."
Part of the new way of working was ensuring that the ambulance crews themselves were safe, as well as ensuring the patients were safe. As Martin points out, nobody wants to see an ambulance coming because, well, things are not as they should be if the emergency services have to be called. But, Martin says, "they actually know in that moment in time, they need us." Crews are rigorously trained to give the best patient care and that care is the same throughout the country.
"We’re a national ambulance service and there are very few in the world and that allows us to do things that other ambulance services can’t and it allowed us to mobilise, even to the Covid thing, very quickly because we’re national, so everything is on a singular set of systems, on a singular screen, as you’ve seen, and we do everything in the same way."
Martin didn’t start off working for the ambulance service. In fact, he quite the circuitous route to nee-naw land and you can hear about that, and more, in the full chat between Ryan and Martin by going here.