Ramblings of a Scottish Student

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now; it’s about my last shift at my voluntary job with a national children’s charity.  I only took 6 calls over the 4 hours I was there; which sounds a lot, but depending on the shift you can easily answer the phone over 30 times in 4 hours!  It was a really stressful shift and it still plays on my mind just now – weeks after it happened.  Out of the 6 calls there were 2 breaches and 3 referrals, which is a lot (we don’t usually do that many in a month, let alone one day!).

The first person who I spoke to was a young girl (early teens) who had lost her mother about 3 months previous in a car accident.  The whole family was in the car at the time of the fatal crash and dad was driving the car at the time.  Her mother was about 6 months pregnant at the time of the crash, and despite the best efforts of the medical team the unborn child also died.  To top it all off the caller’s dad had taken it really badly and had turned to alcohol which was having a huge effect on the young person.  Being in a car accident where your mum and unborn sibling die and your dad becoming an alcoholic.  This is the sort of call that gets all your emotions racing, a young person in such an awful situation, coming to terms with the death of their mum and watching their father ruin his life with alcohol.  As far as the caller was aware the father was not seeking any medical help for PTSD, depression etc.  So after spending a good 40 minutes or so talking to her we came to a conclusion that she was going to speak to her own GP or a teacher at school about the mess that was her home life.  I hope that she did and hope that she gets the help and support that not only she needs, but her dad needs as well.

The second call I took was for an older teenager who had been sexually abused over a period of 5 or so years by his step-father.  He told me that he had taken 40 paracetamol tablets and was just waiting to die.  I conducted my risk assessment and deemed him as being high risk, my supervisor agreed.  I was in the process of trying to get him to allow us to phone an ambulance for him when the one thing worse than the caller hanging up in this situation happened – the line was still connected, but there was no response from the caller.  My supervisor rushed to the CSM who agreed very quickly to a breach and within 5 minutes my supervisor was on the phone to the police and BT to get the call traced.  We stayed on the line until it went completely dead.  We eventually got feedback about this called and it was the worst possible news, but what we expected.  The call was successfully traced, but the caller had died.  I was the last person this person ever spoke to and he probably died while I was on the phone to him.  We doubt the quantity of paracetamol he took, but it was certainly enough to make sure that he died.  His last audible word was “help”.  Just thinking about it upsets me; this will stay with me for a very long time I suspect.

My third caller was a young lad (early teens) who was being sexually abused by this uncle and a number of his uncle’s friends.  This had been going on for about three years.  He wanted to do something about it, but was far too scared to contact the police or social services on his own.  With our help he spoke to a very nice and helpful social worker (a rarity, especially considering this was outside of officer ours).

My fourth call of the shift was from a young girl who was being physically and mentally abused.  From what she was saying her self-confidence and self-respect were non-existent.  She had been drained of everything and was very depressed.  She self-harmed as a result and was making plans for suicide.  I did a risk assessment and deemed her as high risk.  With a little bit of encouragement she agreed to allow us to get social services involved.  This social worker was not that helpful and was doing all the usual things to try and put it off until 9am on Monday.  However, this girl was at serious risk and the couple of days it was until Monday could have lead to a serious or even fatal injury.  We couldn’t have social services shirking their responsibility, so we faxed the details to them meaning the social worker had no option other than to deal with it there and then.  We also told them we would report it to the police as a way of doubly making sure that something was being done (although we didn’t actually report it to the police as the young person wouldn’t let us and as social services were  now involved there were no grounds to breach confidentiality to the police).

My fifth call was from a young person who is a self harmer and had slit his wrists whilst cutting himself.  His description suggested that he was losing a lot of blood. Out of the wounds and that he could potentially have very nasty arterial injury.  He was also becoming very drowsy.  So, as the young person’s life was at risk and he wouldn’t agree to an ambulance the decision was taken to breach the call to the police and BT in the hope that an ambulance would get there in time.  We never got any feedback.  I didn’t have an opportunity to discuss with him the reasons behind his self harming, but through my experience I can have a good guess at it.

My final call ended up being a referral to the ambulance service.  This was an unusual call.  A teenager of around the 15 – 17 category called us terrified.  He and his younger brother had been left alone for a couple of hours to whilst their parent’s went to IKEA.  The caller’s younger brother had somehow managed to get a hold of his father’s drill and had drilled a hole in his leg.  The caller asked us if we could phone an ambulance for him, he gave us all the details and armed with this we held a conference call with the dispatcher, the young person and us to get an ambulance to the young person.  We ended the call leaving the young person on the phone with the dispatcher once we had heard that an ambulance had been dispatched.  We did get feedback from this call and the injury wasn’t as bad as the young person had made us believe, but I suspect the exaggeration was not malicious and came more from the fear of what his parent’s would say when the hospital called them away from their shopping trip.

My shifts are usually eventful and supervisors dread working with me as they know I attract calls such as the above every time I am there, but never usually so many serious calls requiring referrals and breaches.  We were there for a long time doing the paperwork, paying particular attention to the ones that have the potential to go to court or there be a police investigation so that should we have to remember what happened we had enough information to do just that.  I live up to my name of being a drama magnet.  While I was getting all of these high drama calls everyone around me was getting the usual rubbish, I was stressed to the limit and my emotions were shot to bits.  However, I left that shift thinking that I had done a lot of good work that day.

I wasn’t long back from a break from my voluntary work after a very hard shift and I am on another one now because of that shift.  You really do need time to get over calls like those, especially so many in one shift and especially with the outcome of the second call.