The NHS is to introduce electric ambulances, raising concerns that its drive for Net Zero is being put above patient safety owing to the limited range and long charging times. The Telegraph has the story.
Paramedics fear patients will be forced to wait longer because of the hours lost recharging the vehicles, with particular concern about coverage of rural areas, given the limited range.
The move next month is part of a series of measures that whistleblowers fear put green credentials above medical priorities.
The drive had created a bureaucracy that was diverting vast sums from the front line, and placing “grossly unethical” obstacles in the way of clinical decisions, one whistleblower warned.
NHS England has set up a Greener NHS team with a combined salary bill of £3 million a year, leaked documents reveal.
Officials created 48 roles, including five on six-figure salaries, as part of efforts to pursue an environmental agenda which means every medicine and product has to undergo an “evergreen assessment”.
The 135-question process means that no decision can be taken without a product’s social values and contribution to emissions targets being considered.
One supplier alleged that devices such as plastic cannulas were routinely being rejected on environmental grounds, despite the fact they would improve patient safety.
An extra layer of bureaucracy will be added next month, with every NHS supplier asked to draw up a carbon reduction plan.
Other eco-initiatives being rolled out include “climate-friendly pain relief” for mothers in labour and chemotherapy deliveries and GP visits via e-bikes. …
Next month, electric ambulances will be piloted across swathes of the country. Under the scheme, electric ambulances will be trailed across the North West, East of England, Yorkshire, South West and London at a cost of around £150,000 each.
The West Midlands has already introduced the vehicles, although last year board papers from the West Midlands Ambulance Service revealed major concerns.
An evaluation of the pilot scheme found the ambulances took up to four hours to charge and travelled an average of 70 miles between charging, with the papers warning “range and recharge time is a significant limiting factor”.
While the vehicles had a range of 100 miles, which would cover a shift in urban areas, this would not be the case from most of its hubs, it states, adding: “Rural areas in particular are covering twice this mileage and more in a shift.” The report says that, as a minimum, ambulances need to be able to cover 160 miles.
Standard ambulances can cover up to 800 miles a day and be filled up in just minutes.
£3 million a year on 48 roles dedicated to making the NHS less efficient and less safe. No wonder the health service is such an ineffective, bureaucratic mess. And this is under a Conservative Government.
Worth reading in full.
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Oh great, let’s spend more tax payers money on over expensive ev’s that will make the already stretched ambulance service even less reliable at a time when the NHS has never struggled more!
Who are the dim witted idiots that make these fanciful decisions?
No doubt the available hours in service will be cut back, on account of charging times. Maybe that will mean that the fleet will have to be larger to compensate, then perhaps extra jobs for those that look after them, cabs to take the medical staff from here to there (electric, of course), then more forms to fill out (hopefully not paper ones), and extra clerks to process them etc.
You’ll need two ambulances to do the work of one, sort of wash and wear, one charging and one in service,.. unless, there’s a cold winter snap and you might need three to cover for one ice vehicle, one charging, one couldn’t make the distance in the cold and one to transfer the patient into half way to the hospital because number 2 went flat!
Paramedic 1 “can we get a move on Stan, this guy needs a transfusion ”
Driver Paramedic 2 “Sorry Bert, we’re down to 10% battery!, ..and don’t even think about using the defibrillator or we won’t make it back”
Paramedic 1 “Oh ffs, put a call in to control to send out ambulance 3 to come and meet us!”
Paramedic 2 ” ill try Bert, but I don’t think its fully charged yet!”
😀😀😀
One commenter responding to this article in the DT caught my attention. He wrote, (I summarise), ‘I currently run a fleet of 40 vans, and after doing some research decided its far too early to switch to EVs to replace ICE vans. I calculate I’d need a fleet of 80-100 EVs to offer the same reliable service as I’m now supplying. I’ll pass for now thanks.’
I can imagine the scene now, remember how the BBC got relatives of the jabbed it had killed to still big it up and proclaims it’s safety. I can just see young kids whose dad died because the ambulance conked out praising these contraptions for “saving the planet”. We are through the looking glass.
If they turn off the blue lights and sirens they will get more range. Ditto defibrillators and heart monitors.
With a four hour charge time it looks like they will need to allow for 2 vehicles for every diesel one to be sure to get through a single shift with one crew.
Knowing full well that all these measures are going to lead to patient deaths or increase the severity of the injuries it is only reasonable to conclude that this is deliberate planning for worst case outcomes.
The first thing the task force should do is to reduce waste generally, not attack established and working parts of the services. I worked once on a project looking at the contents of a paramedics drug bag, and how often items were being used. Very quickly we identified a special type of airtight dressing for puncture wounds. Every bag had five of them, they went out of date in 60 days, I recall, and of the 10,000 purchased at great expense, they actually used about 20 a year. In every case there was an alternative dressing already in the bag, maybe not such a complete and elegant solution, but they were literally throwing away £500k plus of these bloody things each year and no-one even knew.
Milk floats.
Drinka pinta milka day
Go to work on an egg
Go to the morgue in an electric ambulance
And Bury the dead 3 feet deeper to avoid excess leakage by decay, of green house gasses through the soil into the atmosphere!
(Graves to be dug by electric jcb’s of course)
Electric JCBs lol
When you see news like this, you can’t help but feel that our once great country is rotting. We’ve become a nation of idiots, there is no doubt about this. And what happens to a nation of idiots? It becomes third world.
But when did the rot begin? I think post world war 2, our culture began to degenerate, especially in the 60s. Sex, violence and swearing proliferated, and my era in the 90s was just awful – we were taken over by laddish yob culture; we became yobs. And our generation of yobs ‘graduated’, entered the media and government etc, and the decline accelerated.
And if you think it’s bad now, just you wait until the next generation takes the helm…it’s going to be insane.
Yes. There has always been what I would call a generational thing going on though. I remember my mum telling me that my gran would tell her to “turn that racket off” when she was listening to Frank Sinatra on Radio Luxembourg. My mother did the same thing to me when I was playing “Tumbling Dice” by the Rolling Stones on my Grundig cassette machine. My children now think I am some kind of dinosaur because I think Oasis are a tedious bore. ——But the points you make are very good ones. I kind of blame it all on what I call the Liberal Progressive Virus spreading all over the western world where discipline and punishment are now dirty words resulting in kids running amok with knives and shoplifters filling their rucksacks up knowing no one is likely to stop them doing it as long as they have their hoody up
I agree with some of that but the I don’t think the rot began that early, there was still a reasonable amount of common held respect for others right up into the early 90s.
I think it started falling by the way side around then and in 2019, pre scamdemic, took a nose dive never to recover! A different universe seems to have been slipped into over the last 4 years
I have 5 grandchildren between 11 and 14 and I am quite encouraged by their common sense and bullshit detectors. I’m hoping that their generation will be able to pick up the pieces and rebuild.
That is wonderful news to here👍bless em!
I have been warning about this eco tyranny for about 18 years. I first started to investigate and take an interest in this absurdity and where it was heading back in 2007. What I have found is that even today most people are oblivious to what is going on and why. They are busy with work and family life and will mostly just get some News from the BBC or SKY at 6 or 9 pm and will mostly just take what they hear at face value and think no more about it. I think I read somewhere that 70% of the public get their News from the BBC. I find this to be quite astonishing, considering the BBC is simply a mouthpiece for everything Green and spouts all and everything emanating from the IPCC, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, WWF etc etc as if it were all ultimate truth with no questions asked. When raising any concerns about climate change or its supposed solutions to friends or family many subscribers to DS might have encountered this suspicion that they are some kind of “conspiracy theorist”. ——-However, the conspiracy is on them. Climate Change is clearly the greatest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public who ironically often don’t believe a word coming out of the mouths of politicians yet on the issue of climate change seem to swallow every pretend to save the planet utterance down as if is all common knowledge. ——It isn’t. They are being seriously manipulated for political purposes and they mostly have no clue what those politics are. ——-I challenge each DS subscriber to ask 20 friends or family members this —-“What is Sustainable Development”?
Private customers (i.e. people who spend their own money) don’t want the things any more.
So now the only way to shift the boondoggles is to flog them to public bodies which are populated by people spending other people’s money.
The electric vehicle is the perfect emblem of the insane irrationality of our times in that it doesn’t even work in its own terms given that it just gets the same energy from a second-hand source and that the battery technology itself creates great human suffering. An estimated 7 million Congolese killed in the rapacious grab of rare earth minerals. Obviously it is all nonsense. They won’t be able to keep the battery revolution going on for much longer. You try putting out a lithium fire even a small one. That is why one of the last gasp survival techniques is to split your phone open and pour water on it. This is in a situation so extreme that the value of an immediate source of ignition outweighs any potential future benefits of communication.You will get a strong fire and it will last a long time even in very cold conditions.
We do have serious climatic issues to consider just look at how ten years ago you left your window open in summer and all sorts of insects would appear. They are almost completely gone, I dion’t think that this is a result of carbon dioxide, And if you live in Britain our damp conditions make this a prefect testing ground for very nasty technologies that can piggyback on top of the dampness. We are under attack on every level – that is what is meant by this new idea of warfare. The whole point is to throw you into disarray on every level.
These twats in 2020 would drive around and turn on their sirens just to scare people. I’m afraid I have no time for ambulance drivers. Anyone who would take part in such a charade is beneath contempt in my view.You get off on scaring people I am sure you wouldn’t get off if I scared you. Easy to be a bully.
I agree, most are on the ” chip run”
I live opposite an ambulance station in a town of 10,000 people. During 2020 they appeared to have no ambulances out and were parking the spare ones in a nearby car park as they had run out of space in their depot!
The hospital was virtually empty and the Nightingale, built at great cost in a leisure centre, was never staffed or used.
And this is under a Conservative government. Just think how much worse it could get under a Labour one. At least the Tories are rowing back on Net Zero, if not quite fast enough. It’s not just a question of range and charging time, because as I understand it if a vehicle’s battery is empty the whole thing dies. Imagine a loaded ambulance coming to a dead stop without another nearby to help out…
The Conservatives are tinkering with a few things and making a few speeches to make it look like they’re listening to people’s concerns about the cost of net zero but in reality the changes they’re making amount to f all. For example they pushed back the ban on new ice cars to 2035 but have kept the fines for manufacturers who can’t sell enough of them so that by 2030 80% of new cars will have to be electric. A 20% reduction lasting for 5 years, hardly a major u turn. Similarly they’ve announced the strike price for new offshore wind projects will be £160/MWh in the next auction, more than a lot of existing schemes are getting.
I could go on but it’s too depressing. I voted for them in 2019 for the first time in 7 elections I’ve been able to vote in. Never again!
24 comments———Are you kidding me? ——What hope that this NET ZERO tyranny will ever be reversed when only 24 people on a small website see fit to pass comment?——I suggest NONE
Millions of pounds being wasted on diversity, removing words such as woman from litterature etc. is bad enough but it’s probably the case that sustainability is a much greater threat to patient safety.
Funny but not half as funny as electric tanks. Environmentally friendly to a country, they’re trying to blow up.
If you blow up our tank we will pollute your land with our lithium and fill the atmosphere with toxic fumes possibly for days.
To do 200 miles at 80 mph they will need a 250 kWhr battery. That weighs about 2.5 tons, so vehicle weight will double and is more than a van size vehicle, so Ambulances will be 7.5 tones, and need an even bigger battery, and be much more difficult to manover along narrow roads! Green idiots, green means uneducated!
It’s not just mileage that needs considering but also the wattage used for medical equipment and heating/cooling, especially if the ambulance is waiting for hours with a patient on board. Sorry Doc, they were having a heart attack but they’ve now got hyperthermia.
Given that most ambulances are frequently detained for hours on end outside hospital emergency departments the solution would be to have charging points in hospital car parks. This would enable the vehicles to charge up while the paramedics are doing the work of hospital staff who are doing the work of community/care home staff because the whole system is socialist and therefore completely stuffed up.
This is why the NHS should not be given more unconditional money
Each one of the task force should be ‘damaged’ in some way and made to take an electric ambulance to the second nearest hospital to where the incident took place.
A deliberate policy to bankrupt and disrupt. Perfectly foul, utterly stupid, and murderous.
It will get quite exciting when the damn things start catching fire. A free cremation service for the patients stuck inside?