Dis Life: Patient transport vans cost up to 100k - they're not fit for purpose
I love my wheelchair. It gives me the ability to save myself from physical pain and exhaustion. I can stand and walk a bit, but not always. I’m one of 1.2 million wheelchair users in the UK, and – surprise! A third of us can walk. Sometimes. But it’s painful, or we risk falling or other impairment, or it knackers us out too much. Or we can only do it a bit. This is shock news to so many people.
There is still a myth that if you use a chair for some of the time, you’re ‘not disabled enough’. As if we are all Andy in Little Britain, faking it to be ‘lazy’. I love my wheelchair even more when it works. And this week, it doesn’t entirely work. I took a trip on a G4S patient transport ambulance. I’ve had trouble with these before, when, during Covid, a DNR notice was put on my records. I’m not exactly unprone to the occasional death threat for having opinions (welcome to the world of womanhood in the public eye – see last week’s column), but it’s a bit much when an official organisation smacks a don’t wake me up notice on me because they cock up the bureaucracy.
This time, an ambulance technician didn’t have his eye on the ball, trapped the seatbelt under the chair in the wheels, and after some very bad Star Wars trash compactor noises, the belt was rendered somewhat less of a safety feature. Another bit got knocked off somewhere on the journey as well. I can still use it, but the damage needs fixing and was completely avoidable.
Further, the ambulance needed to take me to a hospital long distance, and nowhere near enough time was factored in by the journey planners. This particular appointment is for a condition which lacks considerable resources across the NHS. Appointments are hard to get hold of. A rebooking is normally the best part of a year away. And due to the late running of this particular service, I missed a vital fifty per cent of it and was lucky to be seen at all.
An eight hour round trip for a half-hour appointment. An eight hour round trip in a brand new ambulance which isn’t entirely accessible. I was strapped in with two seatbelts over both shoulders. When you’re mummified like this you can’t really move. When you can’t really move for over two hours, it hurts. And things swell and take a day or so to recover.
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The seatbelt clip points are higher than the seats, so larger people (hello!) have these digging in to them causing pain and numbness. Brand new rolling stock, designed not to be suitable for every kind of body, despite every kind of body being its stock in trade. An ambulance is pretty much entirely about Disabled people. It’s built for us. It has one job, and that job is to ferry us – Disabled people, chronically ill people, acutely ill people, from A to B – but even now they’re not getting it right. And now, on these new vans, when they put the side step down, a helpful voice tells you it’s been deployed. Every 5-10 seconds. Until the technician closes the door again ten minutes later.
Have these designers not heard of sensory overwhelm? Something which affects the majority of neurospicy people? The technicians need one warning. The rest of us need these vans to shut the jeff up. This kind of thoughtless design causes further disablement. Neither was there a bed in the back. Some wheelchair users, particularly those with energy impairments, struggle to sit upright for journeys.
These vans are somewhere between £70-100k each. They won’t be replaced in a hurry, but they’re not fit for purpose as is. When will those building and buying ambulances speak to Disabled people about our needs before signing on the dotted line? We shouldn’t be in this boat. The knowledge they aren’t right for many kinds of people is there. The expertise to make the necessary changes is there. The decision makers… not so much. It’s infuriating.
And the technicians themselves. Minimum wage earners working nine to twelve hour shifts. They are supposed to have half an hour to 45 minutes break mid-shift. But this often doesn’t happen. It didn’t happen for my crew. These are long hours, where concentration is needed for patients who may have high needs. Driving for a long period can make people tired. We had a moment where I thought we would crash into the back of a rubbish cart on a busy roundabout. Can you blame the workers when they’re not being given rest breaks? No. Arguably half an hour isn’t enough. How can you be fresh after four or five solid hours of intensive care and concentration? Care workers need regular, paid breaks. They care for us. We need employers to care for them, or everybody loses.
G4S issued a statement saying: “We deliver the overwhelming majority of service users to their appointments on time and we are sorry that this did not happen on this journey.
“The safety and wellbeing of our staff and passengers is of the utmost importance, including ensuring they take breaks during their shifts.
“We always welcome feedback and encourage service users to contact us with comments on their journeys.”
The proof is in the action, not the words.
Travel companies need to invest in proper training around what Disabled people need
Here’s a surprise – some of us Disabled people travel internationally. We bite the ableist bullet, and our tongues, and go to places like Spain (where Invalidos is still the default word for Disabled – yes, we are inherently literally still invalid in the language over there), or Greece, where they are making hundreds of beaches accessible. Mamma Mia and stuff me a vine leaf!
It’s seen as such a rarity that we can get out and about long distance that it’s taken until now to have any specialist media about it. Jetsetter Sophie Morgan is now writing a regular column about accessible travel at Condé Nast Traveller. And Lucy Edwards is now getting noticed as a Disabled traveller in the media. And about time too.
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But there are still some headthunking barriers for us to overcome. The Government has sat up and taken notice of the Rights On Flights campaign that Disability Rights UK spearheaded with Sophie in terms of wheelchair care and access – it has (hurrah!) committed to taking action along with the CAA to improve the rights of wheelchair users who too often have their equipment trashed on flights, leading to further impairment and in some cases death, but breathing is a whole other matter.
Airlines must reinstate oxygen canisters for those who need them and aren’t allowed to take their compressor devices on planes due to health and safety. The cost of hiring and purchasing literal air is too much for some people and curtails their travel. It’s not right that people literally need to pay to breathe – something airlines quietly ditched during the pandemic.
We also still need better passenger assistance on planes and in airports. Too often we’re left to struggle alone, or left stuck on planes or in waiting areas while the non-Disabled people get dealt with when it’s often harder for us, we’re in more need of faster solutions, or suffering from more pain and exhaustion, and we need to get to a place of rest or respite sharpish.
It’s not always better on trains either. Eurostar, what are you thinking, not letting some Disabled people travel with their accessibility equipment, again, citing the dreaded and often nonsense, health and safety rules?
I’ve been on the Eurostar and seen skiers and cricketers with enough kit to build a bombproof house with. But if you’re Disabled, and need, say, a specialist bed or hoist set up to go in your destination, so specialist it can’t be hired, you can’t pop it on the train and take it with you for your delicious weekend minibreak. It’s beyond a faff. There is normally a way round these issues, but it takes someone with common sense rather than a computer says no attitude to make things happen. And getting to that stage, jumping through all the call centre hoops, is exhausting. In the meantime, Disabled people are forking out on hugely expensive unnecessary plan Bs in their destination countries, or failing to find solutions and forgoing their holidays and business trip.
This hoop jumping needs to stop. Travel companies need to invest in proper training around what Disabled people need and how we need to be treated so our journeys are easy and seam-free. We know it’s possible, we can get there in the end with the willing, it’s just that we’d rather not need a holiday to recover from the effort of sorting the holiday.
For those of us not going abroad, the heat is on this summer. Quite literally. We’re in for a hot one again. And while some will see it as a chance to top up the tan and bask in the rays, many of us are querulous about what this actually means. Because what it means is climate change is kicking in fast. And who is that going to impact the most, both nationally and globally? Oh go on, take a guess – usual answers apply. Yep. Disabled people!
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