Taking action against verbal abuse

“When someone on the phone is abusive we can’t just hang up on them immediately.”

Most of our patients and those we interact with are polite, pleasant and incredibly grateful that we are there to help them - often in some of the worst moments of their lives.

But unfortunately we have seen an alarming rise in callers who are abusive to our call handlers. The offensive comments can range from basic insults to racial abuse.

The aggression is not only verbal. NWAS took part in a recent Sky News report that showed there were nearly 1,604 physical assaults on ambulance workers across the UK recorded between January and July 2020. These figures are not even for every single ambulance service, so it is a disturbing picture.

Emergency Medical Dispatcher Imran Khan works at Broughton. He joined Team NWAS in April 2020 after working as an air steward on transatlantic flights. He has already experienced two abusive calls.

“In my previous job nobody would ever have used language like that to me, so when it happened I was quite shocked.

“A man had called and was initially fine, he was asking for an ambulance for someone else. Then all of a sudden he turned abusive and used offensive language. I just said ‘I’m not going to tolerate racial abuse.

“Everything around me went really quiet, the whole room fell silent - you could have heard a pin drop. I took it personally because of the language he used, I was really surprised.

“The man’s girlfriend took hold of the phone after he’d said it, and was very apologetic. My supervisor eventually took over. I was asked if I wanted to report it to the police but I decided not to take it further.”

Vicky Blackburn is the Emergency Operations Centre’s regional planning and development manager and chairs NWAS’ ‘Violence and Aggression’ (V&A) group which looks at different ways of supporting our workforce.

“Staff should never have to put up with verbal or physical abuse. It is absolutely not part of the job and we will never tolerate it. When someone on the phone is abusive we can’t just hang up on them immediately, so we have introduced a procedure whereby abusive callers are warned and asked ‘could you please stop this language/tone’ a number of times.

“If the abuse continues, the caller is transferred to a supervisor. Staff understand that anxious callers may be offensive, and are trained to deal with this. However personal insults or threats are not part of the job. Having said that, the safety of our patients is our priority and this also has to be considered at all times.”

To deal with the day to day reality our workforce face, our V&A group has introduced many improvements over the past year - staff can now log these incidents as hate crimes internally. We are also working collaboratively with our police colleagues to encourage reporting and what to expect if charges are brought. We have also been promoting the benefits and use of restorative justice.

CEO Daren Mochrie is very clear that he finds any threat to colleagues entirely unacceptable. “This should not be happening and I encourage anyone, from any part of the trust, who experiences this abhorrent type of abuse to report it immediately.

“No-one should tolerate this type of behaviour and the trust will support all staff that highlight the issue.”