999 call handler Tony Warsop was an executive headteacher of several primary schools until last year when he decided to finally follow his dream of working in the ambulance service.
Here he talks about why the ambulance service is a great place to have a second career.
“It’s never too late to follow a dream.”
Tony Warsop, from Newark, was 40 when he decided that it was time to follow his dream of working for the ambulance service.
At the time, he was a director of school improvement at an academy trust, having worked his way up from primary school teacher, to the headteacher, to the executive headteacher, to the director.
Now, aged 44 and just six months into the role of Emergency Medical Dispatcher (EMD), Tony has already helped hundreds of patients to get the emergency help they need and made a difference to their lives.
Tony said: “I was burnt out and disillusioned with the education system, and I was working all the time. I had no work/life balance.
“I’d always wanted to be a paramedic, but when I was younger I needed to look after my mum who was terminally ill, and just fell into working in education and I couldn’t afford to go back to university to retrain as a paramedic.
“I reached 40 and began to feel trapped – I was earning good money and had a mortgage to pay, so I felt I had to keep doing what I was doing.
“After a long time of thinking about it, I realised that I wasn’t trapped, I could sell my house and move to somewhere smaller, which would allow me to earn less and be happier.”
Tony explains that he wanted to be in a role where he was helping people on a daily basis, while also having the chance to work as part of a big team, connect with colleagues and experience the camaraderie he had been missing.
Then he spotted the EMD role being advertised at EMAS which he successfully applied for and began his training in October 2022.
He said: “When I first joined, I thought it would find it tough emotionally, but actually it’s not that side that I find tough. The pace of the job is much more intense than I thought it would be, and the personal accountability that comes with the role – I need to do a good job for each person who calls 999 for help.
“The hardest incident I have dealt with so far was actually one where I was struggling to locate a patient in cardiac arrest – the caller didn’t know their location and I was distressed as I thought this delay would impact on the patient.
“However, I started CPR instructions, and my colleagues were able to track the location, and the patient survived.
“There are obviously lots of traumatic calls as well, and sometimes you just need to take a bit of time out of the room for a breather.”
However, as this is a second career for Tony, he explains that being older helps with the role as he can draw on his life experiences as part of doing the right thing for each caller.
He says: “Maturity, wisdom, and age help because I came into this job with my eyes open.
“I’ve had traumatic experiences and experienced personal loss, and I’ve seen programmes like Ambulance on the TV, so I knew it was high stakes and high pressure.
“The best part of this job is being on the end of the phone in someone’s darkest moment and having the privileged to be kind, compassionate and find a way to help them.
“Every call is someone’s emergency, even if it’s just toothache and we won’t be sending an ambulance, they have called because they are scared and are reaching out for help.”
Listening to Tony take 999 calls, it is clear that he is the voice that you want to hear in your hour of need: calm, collected and reassuring.
By 1.30 pm, the two EMAS 999 control rooms – one in Bracebridge Heath in Lincolnshire and one near Nuthall in Nottinghamshire – have already taken 1,171 emergency calls since midnight, and the pressure is building across the East Midlands as patients are starting to have to wait for an ambulance response.
The first call that comes in is for an elderly lady in Lincolnshire, with carers concerned about her shallow breathing and blue-tinged lips. Tony gently guides the caller through the emergency call script, gathering all the information needed to be able to categorise the call and arrange appropriate help for her.
Tony explains that unfortunately there is approximately a two-hour wait for ambulance response to the lower category of calls – Category 3 – but is clear to the caller that if the patient’s condition worsens at all, they should call back on 999 immediately so they can reassess the patient.
Tony has barely closed the details of this first incident when his phone rings again and he has to be prepared for whatever and whoever is on the end of the other line.
“Ambulance service, is the patient breathing?’
This time the call is for a young man who is experiencing repeated fainting episodes. Tony explains that a member of our Clinical Assessment Team, comprised of nurses and paramedics, will need to call the patient back to explore his symptoms and advise the best place for the patient to receive medical treatment.
Despite it being early afternoon, our third call is for a man in his 80s who has fallen off a chair in a Nottingham pub, with concerns from the caller, the barmaid, that he has fainted. Just five minutes after this call, we receive a second call from the barmaid to cancel the ambulance – the patient has woken up and left the pub.
Tony explains that the two types of shift that EMDs work can be really different.
For the day shifts, he gets up at around 4.45am to take the dog out before arriving at work for 6.30am and making a drink ready to log on at 7am. Then the shifts are mostly very intense and long days.
He says: “Sometimes it’s relentless. It’s not uncommon for it to be call after call after call without a gap.”
But Tony says he took a bit of time to adjust to nightshifts as it wasn’t something he had experienced before.
He says: “Nightshifts are a bit like a long-haul flight – it’s dark, you don’t know what day it is, there are wafts of food coming out the kitchen at strange times, and all of a sudden you’ve arrived at your destination and it’s time to go home.”
