Ambulance ramping wasn’t the ordeal I thought it would be, writes Miles Kemp

Reporter Miles Kemp had the unenviable experience of being ramped at the RAH last week. But what he has to say about the episode may surprise you.

Advertiser journalist Miles Kemp was ramped at the RAH.

I was “ramped” last week at the RAH.

It sounds like a terrible ordeal. It wasn’t.

Then I spent 12 hours in emergency while a bed became available. It sounds like a horrible ordeal. It wasn’t.

The ambulance had arrived within three minutes as needed, and from that moment on I was in good hands. My head (I always break the fall with my head) was expertly scanned and stapled back together in emergency. It was in the emergency department that they worked out why my defibrillator implant in my chest hadn’t shocked me back to life, and adjusted it so that it hopefully will next time.

By the time I got to the ward upstairs, the attending private cardiologist barely needed to attend and didn’t even until many hours later.

I’m writing this because ICAC is now being used as a threat to attack the people who have twice saved my life in a tit-for-tat political battle about ramping and staffing, and a voice in my head is also screaming “what about the bloody patients”.

Sadly most of the people commenting on the current problems in the ambulance and hospital system aren’t doing it from the position of (what is the major defining difference from most patient’s points of view) looking at the ceiling of either the ambulance, the ED or the cardiac ward.

For most people, including the seriously ill, only the view changes, the machine that goes “ping” or “beep” changes, the level of care doesn’t. Other than the ceiling, the most notable difference is the comfort of the beds they put you in. In the ED you are disconcertingly lying on more of a functional slab which can be easily swabbed down and moved quickly, but in the wards a warm and comfortable bed. In the ED you have no view, replaced in the ward by a view, but only of the Adelaide rail yards below. Oh and in the ED they give you freshly cut sandwiches, not vegetables boiled into mush.

Could I have died? Yes. Did the ramping and ED department delay affect the level of care or the outcome? No?

Did the ED nurse’s jokes within earshot that because I collapsed in a Hungry Jack’s I got a “whopper” lump on my head irritate me? Mildly. Did the ambo ignoring me for a few minutes when an attractive prospect came to flirt with him and fish for a date? No, they’re young.

Are the public comments they want to make about their workplace and the care I got a matter for ICAC? Absolutely not.