What a shame. I’ve been working with different branches of the public sector pretty much my entire career, and the NHS is one of the more frustrating ones to tweak and change.

First and foremost: the frontline workers such as the paramedics; GPs, nurses; and domestic staff are absolute world-beaters. Constantly squeezing conditions and low pay for the amount of work they actually do, and constant battering from the press makes it a really hostile environment for people to do their very best in, but fair play they don’t half put a shift in every day. Good on them.

As for the ambulance service - the last couple of times I’ve worked with them has told me that the two most likely places you’ll find an ambulance is outside a hospital waiting to handover patients; or at an ambo depot because there’s not enough folk to staff them.

Whatever’s left are pulled between dozens of competing calls, a fair chunk of them absolute bollocks too - either self-inflicted (entirely frustrating as the mental health root cause should be tackled before it becomes a paramedic problem), or overdosing (alleged or genuine) which again is either an addiction or a mental health issue.

The resources that remain are thrown to people in cardiac arrest; catastrophic bleeding; or infants. People like the older person in the headline or the footballer in the article aren’t actively dying, so they get pushed to the bottom of the queue.

I’m going to get on my soapbox here and say if I were PM, I’d create a whole new ambulance service for mental health emergencies. It would take the weight off the ambulance service to deal with issues requiring a bit more than battlefield medicine; it would reduce the workload of the police service who frequently get lumbered with mental health calls (and as great as the cops can be at finding solutions to most problems, they’re not mental health practitioners and aren’t the right folk for the job); and it would probably mean the ambo service can work within their current means with such a massive chunk of workload taken off them.

Man I feel better after writing that.