FoI response points to network updates for ambulance outage on England's south coast An IT failure that led to a critical incident delaying ambulance dispatches from an NHS service in the south of England was down to network failures following routine maintenance, according to a Freedom of Information response. During the outage in November, South East Coast Ambulance Service (Secamb) urged people to "consider …
Unison southeast regional organiser Joshua Cooper told the BBC: "Ambulance and control room staff are working tirelessly to respond to every emergency call they receive and doing all they can to keep patients safe. Lengthy delays are causing much distress to NHS staff. Staff are already at breaking point after months of 'winter-style' pressures." (My bold)
While I don't doubt that Unison's statement is true, I cannot help but feel that it was rather ill considered; I suspect that the stress felt by people awaiting ambulance attendance and their families was somewhat greater.
If you get into the position of trying to say one person's anguish is greater than another, then that's no-win territory before you even begin.
If you work for the NHS, it isn't usually for the pay, and doing shift after shift, being unable to give people the best help that you can, whether that be it in a hospital ward, an ambulance or anywhere else in the service, is a constant drain. The whole situation across the health service right now, is not good.
Lengthy delays are causing much distress to NHS staff.
And the source of their distress? BECAUSE the patients and emergencies weren't being served timely and appropriately. And they knew it at the time and were suffering themselves from worry and despair due to a situation outside their control.
Did you not understand the statement was on behalf of the many staff who aren't network wonks?
Your second guessing after the event is quite ill considered, yes, and measures your ability to empathise, not theirs.
Given that the previous AC comments were highlighting the strain on ambulance staff, a number of whom have committed suicide this year; the classification of AC's concern alongside the sarky comments when ambulances block roads, makes as much sense as giving a fish a bicycle, so feel free to put the comments wherever you wish to file them.
All you smartarse ACs are doing a typical tory hit job. Get the plebs to fight amongst themselves.
Look at how much Private Hospitals made at the start of the Pandemic (Private Eye will give you some good facts about that), think about how stressed out the NHS staff are by being unable to provide the help they should, and think about who wins when you try and pit ambulance staff against the general public.
This is a classic conservative ploy. Aren't you old enough to see through this shit?
I think any reasonable person can see through the shit. It's the unreasonable people that can't... but if the reasonable people don't call them on it, then they're free to post their shit uncontested and then the Tory's get to rule forever more.
Not forgetting that a chunk of the NHS privatisation was courtesy of EU laws that meant work had to go out to tender and the likes of Beardy suing when virgin didn't get contracts, etc. - https://davidallengreen.com/2020/05/when-virgin-care-sued-the-nhs-and-how-virgin-have-since-misdirected-and-misrepresented-about-what-happened/ - and I just sit back and giggle manically as people say that the NHS would have been better if we'd stayed in the EU... and... you know... there's so much ill informed crud flying around that I just don't have the energy to fight it all.
I think I read somewhere that about two thirds of NHS work across the board from cleaning and food provision, to scanning and operations is now done by the private sector anyway. Just the clinical side was one third back in 2014 - https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7606 - if anyone believes that the NHS is one solid entity, they need to look at things again.
This is the kind of situation that put me off doing PFI jobs.
Once upon a time (John Prescott era), there was a plan to consolidate the fire service's dispatch centers into 5 super sites. Which meant a new network. Which meant I got a call from one of the bidders. So I walked them through diversity and resilience options. Bidder kept asking for me to design and quote based on ADSL. So I politely declined.
Naturally got some pushback from sales for no-bidding it, but support from Ops and legal. It's the kind of outage potential that kills people and makes the news.
So curious how this outage happened. One good reason to have a dual, diverse network is so you can update one part without risking both, and a total service outage. But designing like that is more expensive.
It's interesting with the 'new' ESN network that some Blue Light services have their control rooms receiving radio traffic in hosted environments, it then gets pushed to a terminal where the user is logged on, where ever that may be. Networking has never been so important. One customer has had WAN problems ever since they started doing this to the extent they had to restrict WAN usage until they could upgrade their connectivity, something that has been ongoing for years now.
Personally, I think that should always be the case, ie keep the SoL/critical traffic away from 'corporate' stuff. Which gets complicated from both network & policy perspectives. So investigators could have a legitimate interest in looking at Facebook or Instagram, administrators might not. So a more challenging set of policies to create and administer. Or just throw bandwidth at the problem.
I've always been a fan of X.x over IP though, given one was designed for this kind of environment, the other wasn't. Despite it's DARPA/DoD origins. Favorite example is the humble D-bit. Set that to 1, and there must be end-end acknowledgement, 0 and the network can ACK it. Or in the IP world, fire it out via UDP and let the app figure it out. So kinda psychic networking because recipients can't know they've not received a critical message. Which can be problematic when you're calling for help. D1 makes that faster to acknowledge than IP can.
But X.25 lost the protocol wars, and various kludges have been applied to IP and apps ever since.
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