“Take your time, I’ll wait!”
AN ambulance took almost 90 minutes to collect a girl and take her to hospital 10 minutes away after satellite navigation blunders.
The crew was misdirected by the equipment to the wrong street, eventually reaching road crash victim Chloe Banks after 32 minutes.
Chloe, 10, kept asking her mum “Am I going to die?” as she waited.
Chloe’s mum Maggie, 39, said: “We told them it was not the quickest way to go. The driver was really apologetic, but he said he had to follow the system.”
What’s up with UK drivers and their over-reliance on NavSat systems? They “had to follow the system”?! Why?
We’ve written before about how UK drivers have even driven into rivers merely because their systems told them to! Do cars in the UK even come with windows nowadays?!
That is kind of insane…almost a slave to technology and depending on it a little TOO much. I mean, just because something can be done with technology doesn’t mean it HAS to be used just for technologies sake.
They should just use the navigation system as a guide…not be totally dependant on it.
Oh, and since just about every post by SN shows some barely covered woman….in the future, when he does something cool, make sure everyone prefaces writing about him with: “Former Semi-Pornography Poster SN”. (sorry…)
Why they “had to follow the system”?
It’s probably not the driver. I could imagine some smartasses in the management forcing drivers to follow “The System” at any cost to save money to the company. Otherwise, drivers will have to fill out forms explaining why they dared not to.
#2- I think you got it. I can see it now, some middle management type holding his coffee cup berating the driver for NOT going in the river. “Mmmmm- yeah…You avoided the river. Mmmmm- yeah- well we are going to have to let you.”
“Fired?” yells the driver, “But if I had driven in the river the ambulance wouldhave broken down andthe patient may have died.”
“Mmmmm- yeah….You have a real problem following orders, don’t you…”
UK? They should have called a cab.
But what happened to faster response times and better looking drivers?!?!?
Guys, don’t post this comment, but have a look http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/4992048.stm . Basically, the UK Govt. agency that controls UK rivers itself got fined for poluting a river!! They couldn’t prosecute themsaelves so they had to get a local farmer to prosecute them! Seems the sort of stuff you folks enjoy !
Cheers
Phil Bridges
(and yes.. I’m English….Doh!)
I don’t want to sound like i’m sticking up for the beurocrats but…
Can you imagine what would happen if this rule wasn’t in place?
The hysterical mother of a dying girl may have given incorrect directions (or perhaps a shortcut she used years ago when she used to live in the are which isn’t there anymore).
The questions that REALLY need to be asked are “Who entered the wrong address?” or “Who’s job is it to keep ‘ The System ‘ up to date?”
Forgive me, but i thought there were some extremely rigorous tetsing procedures to prove a system is safe for use in such a critical situation like in an ambulance?
I think Damien is on the right track. Having and following a set procedure is the proper and best way to do some thing. Otherwise you re-invent the wheel every time you do something. In this case, the blame most likely runs to “garbage in, garbage out”. Why is the map wrong?
I know in my semi-civilized neck of the woods here in Indiana, I was recently looking for a business. The directions I was given sounded long way around so I checked on MapQuest. Yup, they showed a couple of roads that looked shorter. I swear, they were cow paths complete with gates. When I got home, I checked on Google maps. The same roads were there too. The good thing is when I first went, I followed their directions and only looked afterwards out of curiosity.
I can’t imagine trying to use one of those systems in the area where I live [near Portland, Oregon] – it is right on the boundary between two grown-together towns, so a lot of the street names have been “consolidated” to match street-naming guides expanding outward from Portland.
Lots of streets share the same name i.e. “NE 27th Street” just because they are aligned N-S – but they don’t connect to each other. So, you have several “segments” of streets with similar/identical names, but have to use cross-streets & parallel-running streets to acces each section.
Not uncommon to see visitors looking for an address on “27th”, and trying to help them figure out which segment of “27th” that house number is on… 🙂