Comment by analog31
8 hours ago
A friend of mine who was a paramedic told me that getting people out of a building is actually heavy, dangerous work. "They always die on the crapper, up 3 flights of stairs."
Also, in my town, the firefighters are also paramedics. The first people who showed up in my Moment of Need came in a fire truck. The ambulance came a couple minutes later.
For particularly heavy patients, on occasion the only way is to knock down a wall.
I think I've mentioned it before here but at a hospital near me a few years ago they got a bariatric patient in who was so large they couldn't weigh her. I suggested that since they were near a VOSA inspection site they could have just had the whole ambulance on the weighbridge, but apparently when someone is around 350kg you kind of don't need that degree of accuracy.
The hospital facilities team removed the front doors and the unboltable parts of the frame, and then gassed off the handrails and wheelchair ramp fittings to give access.
The ambulance arrived followed by a fire brigade Landrover with four guys in and a rescue pump with another five. It took all of them to lift the patient into the hospital on a canvas sling.