Health & safety bulletin
Holiday safety
16th August 2007
Please see below report of an incident that occurred to a family that was on holiday in Portugal. As the holiday season is now here, please be aware that not all countries are as safety conscious as the UK, and not all emergency services are as capable. Our thanks go to David Thorman and AMEC for sharing this experience.
My Traumatic Holiday Experience By Dave Thorman
Before I go into detail of my horrific holiday experience last year may I start by introducing myself and family. I am a Project Manager for AMEC and currently managing the Longannet Power Station FGD project in Scotland.
My wife Catherine is a Staff Nurse. My younger children are Jack and Matthew, who were then 10 year old twin boys and Emily our daughter aged nine.
We had all been looking forward to our summer family holiday in Vilamoura, Portugal, staying in holiday apartments, overlooking a scenic golf course.
We had only just arrived at the apartments and were sat around the swimming pool, when suddenly I heard the horrendous sound of smashing glass, followed by screams. Instinctively, I looked over to see if my children were OK. They were fine.
I ran over as fast as I could towards the sound of screaming people, closely followed by my wife, to find that a fifteen year old boy had ran through a window at the bottom of some stairs where he had been playing with some younger children.
His leg was covered in blood and even though it had only been a few seconds since he had gone through the window, there was blood everywhere. It looked very serious. Immediately, we put him onto his back and put his leg in the air and promptly started looking for the source of the bleeding. His leg was covered in blood so I started to feel for the laceration. It was horrendous! Half of my hand went into his leg, just above his knee. The cut was projecting spurt after spurt of blood, as if it was surging from 3mm tubing.
At this point the boys mother was running around in shear panic, whilst his father was shouting at him for being so stupid. The poor lad Tom, was lying there white as a sheet shrieking ”Sorry Dad! Sorry Dad!” We got his Dad to hold his leg in the air in an attempt to stem the bleeding.
We tried to stop the bleeding, by pressing firmly into his groin, but to no avail. Now I was kneeling in a pool of congealed blood. My wife had gathered some beach towels to provide a make shift bandage and went on to dress his gaping wound. The blood quickly immersed the towels as the bleeding persisted.
My wife knew the last resort was a tourniquet. She also knew that his femoral artery had been severed and if we couldn’t stop the bleeding, he had only minutes to live. I had once read that an adult has about six minutes to live with an untreated severed femoral artery.
The tourniquet was applied. The following minutes endured my wife taking regular observations and endeavoured to calm not only the boy but his brothers and parents. After about thirty minutes he had started to drift in and out of consciousness, so talking to him helped him stay awake –apparently only to appease his parents. Unconscious people in shock can look dead. The Portuguese Police arrived and did absolutely nothing, they didn’t even get out of their car. Although it seemed like an eternity, the ambulance arrived a short time after.
The ambulance was nothing more than a transit van with a stretcher and some first aid bandages. My wife instructed the ambulance men, via an interpreter, to set up an intravenous drip of saline fluid to increase the volume of fluid in his body and prevent him from going into cardiogenic shock. To our astonishment, they didn’t have any. Inevitably, he had by now drifted into unconsciousness. The ambulance men were calm, very calm, in fact almost in a state of apathy. It was absolutely infuriating. In sheer frustration, at their lack of provisions and sense of urgency, my wife was now yelling at them to get a move on.
Despite our efforts, he was still bleeding and urgently in need of intravenous fluids. We managed to call the emergency services again, via an interpreter, to get a doctor to meet the ambulance half way as it returned to Faro hospital. This action was later to prove a life saving instruction.
As if Tom’s parents were not traumatised enough, they were then denied access into the ambulance and had to follow in their own car. Can you imagine what would have been going through their minds?
Tom’s condition was too serious for Faro hospital to deal with and without hesitation, he was air lifted to Lisbon hospital where prompt action was taken and he was immediately put on a life support machine, whereupon he remained for two weeks. His organs had started to shut down due to the amount of blood he had lost. He had by this point started to go into renal failure.
The next few days of our family holiday were tormented by what had happened and reality had sunk in. To top it all, it was a Portuguese public holiday and nobody was working so my wife, some newly found friends and I were left to clean up the glass, the blood and even a piece of ‘chopped off’ heel. What was worse, we couldn’t find a way of contacting the hospital, we didn’t even know he had been transferred. My wife knowing the seriousness of his condition eluded to us fearing the worst.
Tom’s father had earlier got one of the residents phone numbers and made contact with us about five days later. He told us he was in intensive care and his condition was critical. The next day he phoned back and told us that he had had to have his leg amputated above his knee. Not only had he severed his main femoral artery but his popletiel artery as well. Miraculously, he had survived.
Some five months later we received a very poignant e-mail from Tom’s parents, where they expressed such gratitude for saving their son’s life. Tom had been so brave through all of this and was actually philosophical about the whole thing. He was now a member of the disabled basket ball team and looking forward to being measured for his new prosthesis. On the other hand his parents had gone through all the emotions and had suffered post distress trauma themselves, now having a son who was disabled.
The whole point behind our story is to remind you all that you should not expect the same safety, emergency and hospital treatment standards when on holiday outside of the UK.
When going on holiday please consider the following :-
- Always know the emergency telephone number –mainly 112 in Europe. But check on the Internet what the emergency numbers are and put them in your mobile phone
- Check that large panes of glass are safety glass –put stickers on them if not
- Check where fire exits are
- Check where fire extinguishers are
- Check that you know the number of a local doctor
- Take a first aid kit with you
- Carry out a basic risk assessment for what ever activities you are doing. Eg. No running next to the pool –slippery tiles
- Ensure small children wear arm bands around the pool
- Observe swimming flags at the beach
- Always have comprehensive holiday insurance
If this message saves one person from being hurt it has served its purpose.