SRS we told only to use the 999 emergency service for a life threatening emergency. There is a Norfolk County Council run service called Swift who have teams who will get people up from a simple fall where there are no medical concerns. Their teams carry an air cushion thing they can insert under the casualty and pump up. Their service often has all teams out and no one available though. When this happens, Swift’s own advice is to call 999 as there is no other service who’d do the lifting.

In dad’s case this time round, there were medical concerns as well as the need to get him up and out of the chair. On the medical side, sometimes you may not be sure whether or not to call 999. In this case, you can call 111. They will ask questions, assess the situation and get an ambulance if they feel it is needed.

Dad’s coming home this morning. They gave him blood tests, a brain CT scan and possibly other tests? but found nothing wrong. It’s an odd one. Slurred speech, confused speech, difficult getting the right words out and loss of or decrease in usage of an arm, the symptoms dad has been having on and off do make you wonder about possible small strokes.

And the ambulance taking dad home can’t find us. I don’t know what goes wrong sometimes. We can be difficult to find as going by road signs, the bungalow is out of the village for our address and it is a bit tucked away, set back from the big semi. Over the years, I’ve had several people thst they have been on our road many times and never knew our building existed. On the other hand, the instructions to find us should be easy to follow. Most people find us straight away with them but the odd one gets in a mess.

Ah, he’s home and now they are struggling to get him into bed. I do wonder about ERS (a private company that handles non medical transport for the health service) and the training their drivers get. When I first saw them struggling, I told one of the drivers about the equipment we have and the Ross return is the usual method for transferring dad. I was told that they are not allowed to use them. And it gets worse. The drivers have said they can’t move him and the only thing they can do is take him back to hospital. We’ve got Mike from Elite coming in now and we hope he can help… Ah Mike’s here and dad's in bed. In don’t know where we go from here...