Every incident paramedics attend in a day will be ‘live-tweeted’ during a massive Twitter experiment.
Crews from the North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) will take part in the ‘tweetathon’ to give people a rare insight into what they do.
A member of the trust’s communications team will accompany the crew as an ‘observer’ to tweet throughout a 12-hour shift in Manchester.
It will come after a week of tweeting from other towns and cities in the north west.
Trust bosses have stressed they will not reveal the exact location or personal details of the people they treat.
Derek Cartwright, director of emergency services, said: "The newspapers and airwaves are full of the role ambulance crews play when dealing with alcohol related incidents and although this is important to show, we want people to know about the other side of the service – the race to get to life-threatening emergencies, the rescues and the comfort an ambulance crew can bring to patients and their relatives. We also want to show the human side of the ambulance service.
"Each member of staff is someone’s son or daughter, mother or father. They have feelings and emotions like everyone else, yet they carry out acts of courage every day in what can be a demanding and stressful job. The day to day working life of an ambulance crew can be unpredictable. We never completely know what’s behind each 999 call until we get there, so we have no idea what we will experience on the day. However, it’s sure to be informative and interesting."
NWAS receives more than 3,000 emergency calls every day and covers an area of more than 5,400 square miles with a population of over seven million people. The crews will be live-tweeting from Liverpool on Monday, Burnley on Tuesday, Kendal on Wednesday, Crewe on Thursday before arriving in Manchester on Friday.
The tweetathon comes after Greater Manchester Police posted brief details of all 3,205 incidents in a day.
Among the incidents were a runaway horse and reports of teenagers throwing a huge snake over a fence.
You can follow the tweetathon at www.twitter.com/nwambulance .
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ANTI SOCIAL NETWORKS
and a great number of people do not Twit, Tweet, email, Message or live through mobile phones or the web !
Being part of an ageing population does not mean you can afford gadgets or even want to communicate through these channels. User groups tell us even watching their local news on TV is being overloaded with Twitter-thon .
Being told that your local police team can be emailed and is running live Twitters also has an isolating effect on many.
Information technology is great but when services question what has happened to Good Neighbours and Community. they need to remember that speaking face to face is the human touch that so many people need. That makes FEELINGS.
NWAS do a great job and this isnt to put them down.
I'm surprised they've got the time and the money to waste on such a pointless activity. Let's hope nobody dies as a consequence of them concentration on moronic social network sites when they should be out saving lives!
Maybe this is why I was recently refused an ambulance, having never called one in my 44 years, was refused one as I was not unconscious!
People who slag off social networks are the same as the people who said the telephone would never catch on when Alexander Graham Bell invented it.....#ultraconservatives #stuckinthepast
it amuses me that people so against this exercise choose to voice their opinions of social networks and use of web-based communciation in the comments section of the internet version of the MEN
Personally I think its a great idea.
Stop whingin! This is in the public interest. It will show us just how stupid some of the call-outs they receive are. It will also show, as if we don't already know, what a difficult and dangerous job they do.
Remember, for every incident thats tweeded by NWAS - you can be sure the police will be going too, as the person who just collapsed once "raised his voice and swore" - meaning he'll be shown as "violent" on the database.
For those maoning - pardon the pun but 'get a life'?!! Having an extra member of staff in one vehicle per day in the whole of the North West is hardly life threatening? Patient care will clearly not be affected any more than when an extra passenger is present (be that student nurse/paramedic or relative). If this informs and educates the public as to the actual work the ambulance service do then surely it can only be a good thing. Who knows, maybe even those who use ambulances as big yellow taxis for things such as being in a routine normal labour or simply being intoxicated will watch and realise that they're delaying ambulances getting to genuine emergencies by their selfishness as a result of this?
You didn't read the article properly......a member of the communications team is going out as an observer! So it's not the paramedics doing the tweeting in between emergencies????!!!!!
It's a good idea so people get an idea of exactly what paramedics have to do every day!! Fantastic they are and should be paid a hell of a lot more!!!!
Why do people have to rubbish things like this and not see it as its meant to be? Merely an exercise to educate and inform people!