John is top of his game and has often referred to the trauma system in NI as third world (he is right) and highlights the rural nature of the country making it even more vital. If you have a bad off in NI, your chances are bleak. You wait for a yellow van to eventually get to you from up to 50 miles away down crap rural roads, then with no other option have to be loaded into the back and bounced around in the back for how ever long it takes to get to the nearest hospital, where in the majority of cases will just be an A&E with random junior doctors taking their turn covering it, as we have NO trauma network.    This article comes after a long line of the Doc calling for this to change and yesterday evening another biker didn't make it in a rural area :(

 

For those who remember my modified ZZR1400, I bought it off John. Any NorthWest200 fans will know him as DocJohn, the guy who rides the circuit during the races laden down with big panniers and packs of medical equipment and is the first response a rider gets in the event. It's epic to watch him passing competitors having the time of his life in the process and putting them to shame lol 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-33137007

We have loads of money to help the dross of society benefits cheats and god knows what else

But not enough money for health care.......

In Lincolnshire and I suspect most other Counties it is run by charity.

 

http://www.ambucopter.org.uk/

 

One of our RATS (Triumph owners group) is a volunteer with them.  They have a number of charity shops in the County and he does his bit driving a van and collecting or delivering stuff foe them as well as fund raising.  In fact they are one of our nominated charities as a group.

 

I cannot see how in this day and age an area as big as NI can not have one.  I think the point about the money raised by a charity mostly going to wages and costs is often true of many charities sadly but this should be addressed and not used as an excuse for not doing it.

In Lincolnshire and I suspect most other Counties it is run by charity.

 

http://www.ambucopter.org.uk/

 

One of our RATS (Triumph owners group) is a volunteer with them.  They have a number of charity shops in the County and he does his bit driving a van and collecting or delivering stuff foe them as well as fund raising.  In fact they are one of our nominated charities as a group.

 

I cannot see how in this day and age an area as big as NI can not have one.  I think the point about the money raised by a charity mostly going to wages and costs is often true of many charities sadly but this should be addressed and not used as an excuse for not doing it.

 

There was a charity set up in NI for this years ago but it was shut down when 90% of money raised went on running costs and wages alone. There are a load of different revenue streams used in the rest of the UK with registered charities, sponsorships and gov funding. But even if we had one set up and working today there is no trauma network to cater for it to be put to good use. There are A&E's that are considered death sentences at various hospitals. An example of which was my father having a heart attack a few years ago and being taken to a specific A&E known to be crap and being sent home an hour later failing to recognise it, the actions of a nurse relative and his own GP saved his life putting him on a cocktail of drugs and to the top of an 8 month heart surgery list. I recall a doctor possibly DocJohn saying something along the lines of being in an ambulance with a relative in the same area and telling them not to go there and to go direct to our only hospital in Belfast with some actual expertise an hour away on a good day with blue lights for a relative having a heart attack as he knew as bad as that was, it was their best chance (worked by luck too). 

 

We have a Police ASU which is 100% gov over funded (they failed to spend £18million last year despite saying they had run out of money). It does annoy me that we have a Eurocopter EC135 & EC145 and an Islander twin prop plane for the purpose of surveillance alone, before critical life care. The EC145 does get used sometimes essentially as a taxi to lift injured people, but this is sporadic and not fit for purpose in current configuration. We used to have helipads at all the hospitals, but now they are gone.  A joint venture with the police for a larger fleet of multirole aircraft on the EC145 airframe would be the most cost effective way to go in my mind, with priority on life critical calls over filming people from the air and on one occasion at great public expense when a private helicopter crashed in fog on a mountain, the police decided the next day minus the fog to go and crash the brand new EC145 beside it............. 

 

 

Here is some DocJohn action from this road racing season:

 

I have only ever done one job where yaa was needed best group of people you can want by your side

I have also done a few courses with them

Yet I can not get my head round how and why the government are not founding theses

They save life's

However let's have some more money for a floating duck house on some MPs pond or a 5 star lunch with drinks on the tax payer

Sorry to rant but this is something I feel very strongly about

Plenty of Helicopter paid for by the British Tax payer flew over Northern Ireland and the Border areas for many years.

Lots was paid then in benefits for wasters, shirkers and lay abouts and many of those were politicians.

Actually this still goes on to this day, no different there from the Mainland UK.

 

Air Ambulance cover is invaluable, but then so is adhering to the road speed limits and drivers being aware of roads and conditions, 

be that 4 or 2 wheeled or multi wheeled.

 

Not anti bike, and i am very grateful to emergency services having had a leg traumatically amputated by a car while i was on a Motor Cycle.

 

So lets support in any way for Air Ambulances, Mountain, Cave Rescue, Marine Search and Rescue etc,

the Tax Payers pay the Military to train plenty and to do ceremonial stuff, and for the Police to police marches and conferences etc.

This would be better spent on essential services would it not.

 

Lets get Prince Harry in one of these Helicopters like his big Brother doing some useful work, 

and Uncle Andrew as well. we pay them already to fly around for leisure activities as it is with Diplomatic and Royal Protection,

so no extra expense required.

Plenty of Helicopter paid for by the British Tax payer flew over Northern Ireland and the Border areas for many years.

Lots was paid then in benefits for wasters, shirkers and lay abouts and many of those were politicians.

Actually this still goes on to this day, no different there from the Mainland UK.

 

Air Ambulance cover is invaluable, but then so is adhering to the road speed limits and drivers being aware of roads and conditions, 

be that 4 or 2 wheeled or multi wheeled.

 

Not anti bike, and i am very grateful to emergency services having had a leg traumatically amputated by a car while i was on a Motor Cycle.

 

So lets support in any way for Air Ambulances, Mountain, Cave Rescue, Marine Search and Rescue etc,

the Tax Payers pay the Military to train plenty and to do ceremonial stuff, and for the Police to police marches and conferences etc.

This would be better spent on essential services would it not.

 

Lets get Prince Harry in one of these Helicopters like his big Brother doing some useful work, 

and Uncle Andrew as well. we pay them already to fly around for leisure activities as it is with Diplomatic and Royal Protection,

so no extra expense required.

 

None fly over here now, with the exception of using the conveniently left no low flying restrictions over all of NI (resulting in mass panic recently with a wide bodied aircraft brushing trees in densely populated areas, with the police having to appeal for witnesses as they were not told either and were inundated with calls) Plenty flew in the past for the purpose of suppressing a terrorist organisations ability to launch attacks in GB freely, by implacing a massive target within NI. These were not suited for or used in an air ambulance role and correctly not used as such. On occasions of mass civilian casualties depending on circumstances some types were used to transfer patients to further away hospitals to free up resources for more critically injured etc. NI had an equivalent expenditure on politicians of about 5% of that in GB since the government was removed and all controlled directly from Westminster (current state of the medical system being on of the legacies of that time still). Benefit recipients until more recent times has never been anything other than that of GB, current issue being over 80% loss of industry (like everywhere else, but a bit higher) due to overseas production in places like China and with a land border to another country which offers tax breaks to everyone who goes near them (not allowed to be competitive). Of the current living population including children and foreign nationals, more than 1 in 10 people in NI are security services veterans and the average length of service being just over 3 times longer than GB counterparts. In that light the military covenant is being fully suppressed and not met and there is no PTSD care available (high suicide rates with only option of paying for private treatment) In recent news London has decided that while some victims of terrorism will not be entitled to a state pension, they are happy to announce that convicted IRA terrorists can all have one, despite most of them not even being from the UK..........  

 

Need to start using my old sig again after that lol

 

There are bigger wastages than the likes of ceremonial activities of the armed forces (as they are employed and it gives them something to do, other than that would be to reduce further the already undermanned defence structure available). The public sector procurement contracts are a joke! Needed a new display and had to find a specific product to present to company who had exclusive procurement contract, £899 in Currys VAT paid, they got us the same model for a mere £50K off our budget and after kicking off agreed a mistake had been made and it was only £30K..... And that's one of millions of items this happens with, reason for the contract being awarded was to meet targets to reduce numbers in a specific organisation on paper and pay someone else more to do their job. 

Tell that to the MP's and MEP's then. 

 

The people of Northern Ireland have the powers to get what they want, just pull together, sorted,  seems simple.

Tell that to the MP's and MEP's then. 

 

The people of Northern Ireland have the powers to get what they want, just pull together, sorted,  seems simple.

We have too few to have any say in central government. NI doesn't have the powers to get what they want, both political sides have been united for some years now in the NI assembly and together not agreeing with what London still says must go. In the air of working together, we have hundreds of convicted murderers who were all just let out of prison now in government inc elected MP's....... For the government side at least, they couldn't have done more to work together and no one would ever have expected they would have done as much as they have. Despite still having around 500 bombs planted willy nilly all over NI per year (which will never appear on the news in GB....) they have kept their side of the bargain by working together under still strenuous circumstances. 

 

But on the issue of air ambulance cover, it's only a part of a massive disaster of an infrastructure that is the health care system here. If I was to have a heart attack, I am nearly 3 hours by ambulance from anywhere more equipped to deal with it than a GP's surgery. MRI, CT etc all only happen in one hospital in Belfast for over 1.6 million people. Can you imagine the waiting lists lol 

Don't imagine it is much better over here Fuby it isn't.  Our local Ambulance service has just been criticised again for failing to meet target times.

 

http://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/Grimsby-s-ambulance-service-misses-response/story-26707430-detail/story.html

Don't imagine it is much better over here Fuby it isn't. Our local Ambulance service has just been criticised again for failing to meet target times.

http://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/Grimsby-s-ambulance-service-misses-response/story-26707430-detail/story.html

Ours too. But they keep closing down local ambulance and fire stations and having bigger ones further away.

It doesnt make sense.

They atleast need to put a v8 on those ambulances to make up for it.

Here for quite some years they have stopped crews from sitting in Ambulance stations waiting for a call and they are sat at strategic places around the County in an attempt to cut down response times.  There is also the Rapid Response cars  which you usually see flying about (and I do mean flying as they are usually airborne) and then the L.I.V.E.S first responders  http://www.lives.org.uk/. 

 

With all of that there are still horror stories about response times but the Hospital system is shot to pieces as well.  For example if you have a heart attack in Grimsby as a good friend of mine did recently you have to be transferred to Scunthorpe as Grimsby do not treat heart attacks or strokes.  They opt to do certain procedures as do the other hospitals presumably the ones they think will make them the most income.

 

In fact when my friend was transferred to Scunthorpe a second patient was transferred at the same time in a second ambulance with a second crew.  Governments making the rules up as they go along and making hospitals stick to ridiculous budgets (which they cannot do).  Lets face it there are many people on the forum who work in business of one form or another and I am sure they could make a better fist of it.

Don't imagine it is much better over here Fuby it isn't.  Our local Ambulance service has just been criticised again for failing to meet target times.

 

http://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/Grimsby-s-ambulance-service-misses-response/story-26707430-detail/story.html

tbh I lived in England for over a decade inc driving ambulances, it's night and day! When people talk about the golden hour etc, you'd be lucky to get an ambulance on site within an hour in too many places (talking in an RTC sense not off up a mountain). There are big issues building up steadily in GB too with the NHS and it's disgusting (it's being stretched and pushed too far and the staff treated poorly IMO, needs a real boost in the form of cash today +25% on their budget and the freedom to direct it how they see fit). But NI is still operating in a 60's set up in comparison. Child cardiac = an aeromed flight to England which a year or so ago got in the news as the plane had to make an emergency landing and the parents were speaking to the media about how the twin prop heap had fully open holes in the fuselage. Anyone with a child in this country who needs immediate cardiac care, must instead buy a coffin. Laws being different here hit a few other parts like abortion is illegal in NI, so no money gets wasted there. 

Here for quite some years they have stopped crews from sitting in Ambulance stations waiting for a call and they are sat at strategic places around the County in an attempt to cut down response times.  There is also the Rapid Response cars  which you usually see flying about (and I do mean flying as they are usually airborne) and then the L.I.V.E.S first responders  http://www.lives.org.uk/. 

 

With all of that there are still horror stories about response times but the Hospital system is shot to pieces as well.  For example if you have a heart attack in Grimsby as a good friend of mine did recently you have to be transferred to Scunthorpe as Grimsby do not treat heart attacks or strokes.  They opt to do certain procedures as do the other hospitals presumably the ones they think will make them the most income.

 

In fact when my friend was transferred to Scunthorpe a second patient was transferred at the same time in a second ambulance with a second crew.  Governments making the rules up as they go along and making hospitals stick to ridiculous budgets (which they cannot do).  Lets face it there are many people on the forum who work in business of one form or another and I am sure they could make a better fist of it.

 

One of the big heritage issues is that in NI there are a crazy number of hospitals all over the place, more per head of population than anywhere else in the UK. Current slow time plan is to close them all and leave 6 acute hospitals regionally and some others kept for specialist care. This is ok ish on paper but due to the rural nature of 95% of the country it takes a lot of time to get from A-B and you have to go through 20 towns to get from one place to another. As it stands we have a brand new massive acute hospital just up the road from me, but 3/4 of it is closed as no medical professionals want to work in NI lol. They have turned people away as full based on number of staff despite ward after ward being empty. They have every piece of equipment you can imagine in the place, but only form of scan operational is X-Ray and thats only 1 of 3 Siemens units live (blue books must look like a joke for that kit now :( ). Strangely the new hospital doesn't have ambulance facilities, they were at the old hospital which was knocked down, before it fell down.  No idea why but they never built it to house them, ambulances sit now litrially in a fenced off spot in the middle of the rubble at old hospital a few miles away. Don't really have a first responder volunteer type force operating here, but there are ambulance cars dotted about the place (Scout inc ) those boys and girls do fly about the place to be first on scene! Still the gap waiting for a yellow van to pitch up is worrying and the ride a patient is faced with once on board. Spinal cases are just bang out of luck. Right now though anyone who works in any medical field can more or less have their pic of jobs here, but there is a massive emigration culture and so many go to Australia it's unreal! 15 odd in my family of the same generation in last 5 years ish and maybe 10 or 12 of my form class of 28 in secondary school. 

Ours too. But they keep closing down local ambulance and fire stations and having bigger ones further away.

It doesnt make sense.

They atleast need to put a v8 on those ambulances to make up for it.

Just seems to be the way of it now :( I can't think of any full time fire stations here, we seem to generally have the volunteer ones who have beepers and drop what they are doing and have to be within a certain driving distance of the station etc. In the town my grandmother lived in right up until the late 90's they didn't have beepers, but an old WWII air raid siren which would be sounded instead, used to test it once a week too on a Sunday after church. Was the coolest thing ever, primitive, but worked  

Just seems to be the way of it now :( I can't think of any full time fire stations here, we seem to generally have the volunteer ones who have beepers and drop what they are doing and have to be within a certain driving distance of the station etc. In the town my grandmother lived in right up until the late 90's they didn't have beepers, but an old WWII air raid siren which would be sounded instead, used to test it once a week too on a Sunday after church. Was the coolest thing ever, primitive, but worked

Hahahaa. That is cool, in a sort of, really uncool way? Haha

No word of a lie. We had a firestation here in buxton, which apparently wasnt good enough, so they build a new one, costing £3.5 million. Nice one, it looks fancy, bigger, etc etc.

Until litterally 2 years later they say theyre knocking it down and relocating.

Wtf?

Heres a brief article..

http://m.buxtonadvertiser.co.uk/news/local/high-peak-fire-stations-facing-closure-1-6102153

Hahahaa. That is cool, in a sort of, really uncool way? Haha

No word of a lie. We had a firestation here in buxton, which apparently wasnt good enough, so they build a new one, costing £3.5 million. Nice one, it looks fancy, bigger, etc etc.

Until litterally 2 years later they say theyre knocking it down and relocating.

Wtf?

Heres a brief article..

http://m.buxtonadvertiser.co.uk/news/local/high-peak-fire-stations-facing-closure-1-6102153

Just googled around a bit, apparently my town was an exception (a lot of drumlins so sound wouldn't carry) as most fire stations used the sirens. They were cold war sirens and in 1992 they moved them all to fire stations all over NI LOL 

 

One of these pics is the one I used to here taken in 2010 still ready to roll lol. 

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/alistairmccann/sets/72157622464324370/?view=sm

Just googled around a bit, apparently my town was an exception (a lot of drumlins so sound wouldn't carry) as most fire stations used the sirens. They were cold war sirens and in 1992 they moved them all to fire stations all over NI LOL

One of these pics is the one I used to here taken in 2010 still ready to roll lol.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/alistairmccann/sets/72157622464324370/?view=sm

Aha. Thats mad isnt it. Surely they should of bren decomissioned years ago!

Aha. Thats mad isnt it. Surely they should of bren decomissioned years ago!

No idea what the score is with them today, tornado warnings maybe lol  :peek:

No idea what the score is with them today, tornado warnings maybe lol  :peek:

Flood warnings.

Flood warnings.

That would be a good use in my area. The places in those pics for some reason are all coastal and no real flooding history. My new thoughts are for Viking landings!  

We do have them here as flood warning.  Mind you most of the flooding is caused by poor drains that are maybe from the Victorian era and haven't been replaced yet.  OT I know but my wife and I went to have our haircut the other day and outside the hairdresser's house they were digging up the drains.  Local highways doing it because the drains are knackered and any reasonable rainfall and the road floods which means that the houses across the road from her have flooded cellars.

 

So good of them to get on with it really.  Well apart from the fact that it has taken 8 years to get around to doing it with regular floods in between.  Oh and the fact that the week before they resurfaced the road that they were digging up!!!!!!!

 

So yes off topic apart from it all relates to poor decision making by successive governments and local councils who we vote in to look after us.

We do have them here as flood warning.  Mind you most of the flooding is caused by poor drains that are maybe from the Victorian era and haven't been replaced yet.  OT I know but my wife and I went to have our haircut the other day and outside the hairdresser's house they were digging up the drains.  Local highways doing it because the drains are knackered and any reasonable rainfall and the road floods which means that the houses across the road from her have flooded cellars.

 

So good of them to get on with it really.  Well apart from the fact that it has taken 8 years to get around to doing it with regular floods in between.  Oh and the fact that the week before they resurfaced the road that they were digging up!!!!!!!

 

So yes off topic apart from it all relates to poor decision making by successive governments and local councils who we vote in to look after us.

This is where we are in the stone age, local councils don't do anything like that here. They don't do housing (council houses), roads, drainage, benefits etc. All they do is planning (buildings only), refuse collection and dog licencing basically. The rest is all controlled by single government bodies which cover the entire country. An example of how funds are allocated about 10 years ago a crisis state declared on road condition and a mere 82 million redirected for it (at the time estimates of £14 Billion required to meet the governments own min specs). Out of that money with the worst roads in the country in my county we got 2 mini roundabouts and no repairs as such lol. And this year the body that covers roads etc 'TransportNI' had their budget taken off them and it was redirected into the waterways body as they had run out and not yet met their EU obligations and faced massive fines..... So we now have zero for road repairs let alone improvements. Last I saw was the road guys out at a big bit of road subsidence with the small plastic bags of cold tarmac for driveways dumping it on the road...... futile.We don't have council tax, we still pay rates of which we get less back than we pay out for the local area, so they can build posh stuff in Belfast (Belfast city alone is well over half the population of the country though and it's a tiny city).

 

Floods wise, my county is an island one with hundreds of islands and a 11 mile wide 100 mile long lough, we have the highest rainfall in the UK being the first to get the weather off the atlantic and flooding is just part of how it is. Natural drainage is good as it's mostly green and the most sparsely populated county in the UK, but when it's at saturation point WOW! Towns get flooded and cut off thousands of cattle can drown and with the exception of me everyone seems to own a boat lol. It's a beautiful place, but it's so poorly run. With all actual control carried out by the civil service independently there are no local elected representatives who can impact change on them. 

Do you work for the Tourist Board by any chance? :no:

Do you work for the Tourist Board by any chance? :no:

I have given tours to visitors many times here, but not the sort the tourist board would approve of