Yeah, lots of people do hesitate about calling the emergency line -- I think there's a lot of drilling into people "don't call it as a joke" and "don't waste peoples' time calling for non-emergencies", and so there's a worry about whether a situation is ENOUGH of an emergency to warrant it. But that's why they have the call handlers to do triage, and in the UK certainly there are first responders who are local volunteers and contacted to go out to edge cases or for the situations where an ambulance will probably be needed eventually but it's not a priority so it'll be a couple of hours -- they manage the situation and can confirm whether to send an ambulance and how urgent it is. So just going ahead and calling is the right thing to do! I'm glad things went well in your situation.
Defibrillators are great! Not enough people are aware that they even exist, really. And they are absolutely designed to be as user-friendly as possible to random members of the public :) Here you can start them but they won't open until you've called 999 and the call handler gives you the unlock code, so you have both the friendly box AND the 999 person there to give instructions, you're not muddling though it on your own :)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2020-12-02 04:05 pm (UTC)Defibrillators are great! Not enough people are aware that they even exist, really. And they are absolutely designed to be as user-friendly as possible to random members of the public :) Here you can start them but they won't open until you've called 999 and the call handler gives you the unlock code, so you have both the friendly box AND the 999 person there to give instructions, you're not muddling though it on your own :)