Author: Iona June

Thought for the Week

After visiting an elderly family friend, I realised that in a world of new connectivity people are being left behind. We have social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram. We have all of these things yet there are people who are still disconnected from society.

For example the woman me and my family visited, she has Facebook but no one has shown her how to use it! Imagine having nobody to talk to for hours on end every single day, and thinking no one wants to visit because you have trouble hearing.

“It just goes to show that with the right help, people can overcome loneliness and reconnect with society”

You can’t go anywhere because your legs don’t work anymore, being alone with all of those thoughts. Then imagine how happy you would feel if someone came to visit you once in a while, imagine how much impact we could make if we tried harder to care for our senior citizens. Doing things like helping them work technology getting them a newspaper heck even just sitting down and having a chat could help so much with the mental health of the elderly citizens in our society.

I interviewed a fellow pupil and she had this to say ‘My gran was in her house on her own with nobody to talk to so she fell into a depression, but with the help of the doctor me and my family’s support she was able to overcome her depression and become a more sociable and happy person’.

It just goes to show that with the right help, people can overcome loneliness and reconnect with society.

Ambulance Times

by Iona McKnight

Some rural areas of the UK are slightly more at risk when it comes to waiting on an ambulance because it is taking longer for ambulances to get there. Some people in the rural areas wait around twenty minutes for an ambulance to arrive, which can cause issues especially when the situation could be life threatening. People in charge have said that they understand the wait is too long, however the staff are working very hard given the circumstances. The amount of demand is also a factor.

The most important cases include: a person going into cardiac arrest, stabbings, a lot of blood loss, seizures, people having trouble breathing, or women in later stages of labour. All of which are very urgent and every minute counts, in more urban areas, the average time it takes is about seven minutes whereas in more rural areas, the average time is about eleven minutes. This shows how the location affects the arrival time of the ambulance. Cardiac arrests are the most at risk from the delayed responses as the people helping someone who is going in to cardiac arrest have to give the person CPR in order to treat them as well as an electric shock. Two thirds of people who are treated survive this, however, every minute that they are not being treated reduces the person’s chance of survival by ten percent. Therefore critical situations are prioritized over more trivial ones.

The national target time is eight minutes. In some cases, ambulances took 18 minutes to reach their destination. If you would like to learn more about this story you can click on the link below.

BBC News Scotland