Paramedic Julian Rybarczyk looks back on life-saving career

Julian, from Garelochhead, will complete his last regular shift on April 30, after a 31-year career with the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS).

But with the country’s emergency services stretched as never before due to the coronavirus pandemic, it’s no surprise that Julian has agreed to remain available in some form to lend a hand once he’s reached the official retirement age.

“I was asked to consider staying on,” Julian told the Advertiser, “and although I’m going ahead with my retirement I’ve agreed to stay on the ‘bank’ as a paramedic.

“One of the things that’s changed the most about the way we work over the years is that a Helensburgh crew can now go just about anywhere on a call – if we’ve just taken somebody to the RAH [Royal Alexandra Hospital] in Paisley, for example, our next call could be to Johnstone or Kilbarchan or somewhere like that.

“I’m not keen on travelling all the way to Glasgow for work after I’ve retired, but I’m happy to stay on as a ‘bank’ paramedic in Helensburgh and the surrounding area.

“Being able to give something back to the community has been great. We still get callouts to the local community, and there are still some people in the village who will say ‘oh, I’m glad it’s you, Julian’, when we arrive. That’s a nice feeling.”

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Julian, who spoke to the Advertiser just after completing his final night shift, started working with the SAS in September 1989, after 12 years with the Forestry Commission.

At first Julian, and his colleague Michael Banyard, worked from their homes in Garelochhead, before moving to a base at what was then the Victoria Infirmary in Helensburgh and, eventually, to a purpose-build station erected, after a lengthy planning wrangle, at what is now the Victoria Integrated Care Centre in East King Street.

Twenty-seven years ago, he was featured in the Advertiser after he successfully underwent the tough training course to become a paramedic – the first member of the Helensburgh team to do so.

In that 1993 article, we reported that Julian saw his role as “just like any other job” – though with more than a quarter of a century of being a paramedic under his belt since then, he now sees it slightly differently.

“What I meant was it’s a job, you’ve got to get on and do it, and then you finish doing it and you go home,” he said.

“But it’s definitely a special job. I’ve loved every minute of it.

“Having said that, many a time I’ve come back home at the end of a shift and had a wee cry to myself, or a wee dram. You never know what you’re going to get.”

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The coronavirus pandemic has imposed plenty of extra requirements on Julian and his ambulance service colleagues – mostly relating to extra cleaning of their equipment and their vehicle, and changes to procedures when dealing with patients and transferring them into the care of hospital teams.

“It’s definitely involving quite a lot of extra work,” Julian continued.

“I was working on nights when all this really started hitting us, and nurses at the Vale, the RAH or wherever we went were showing us in detail what they expect of us.

“We’re so busy in the service that there isn’t a lot of time for training,” Julian said, “so when something as big as this hits us, the service has to fire training videos and emails at us regularly.

“We now have to be extra careful with the procedures involved when we take a patient to hospital, making sure not to touch any more than we absolutely have to.

“With every patient we have, we have to gear up in case they sneeze, cough or splutter, just in case they’re carrying the virus.

“We have visors, masks and gloves, and I tell all the crews I work with ‘don’t take your mask off’.

“After you’ve done your handover at the hospital you then have to take all your gear away and thoroughly decontaminate it, and then clean out the ambulance – all the alcoholic wipes and washes we have to use leave your hands red raw!”

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Julian’s career ambition growing up, to become a doctor, was derailed when he was unable to gain the necessary qualifications at school.

But after 12 years as a chargehand in the forestry industry – “a hard job; real graft”, as he described it – a vacancy arose with the ambulance service, based in Julian’s home village.

He didn’t apply for the vacancy when it first arose, but he took a different view when the job of ambulance technician was advertised for a second time – and he’s been on the frontline with the emergency service ever since.

The way of working described above – with the nearest ambulance going to the next emergency call, regardless of the station at which that ambulance crew is based – is just one way the job has evolved over the years, alongside access to more, and better, drugs, improved equipment and cutting-edge technology.

But according to Julian, one of the biggest aids to the way ambulance crews work is the support they receive from local communities.

That’s partly down to the ever-growing network of ‘public access defibrillators’ in Helensburgh and Lomond and beyond, which members of the public can use to administer emergency first aid until an ambulance crew arrives – but also down to human volunteer helpers.

That help is provided by groups such as as the Garelochhead and Rosneath Peninsula Community First Responders, established in 2013 and now one of more than 130 similar groups across Scotland – though a knock-on effect of the current pandemic has been to suspend the work of those groups until further notice.

“The defibrillator network is a great thing to have if somebody collapses,” Julian continued.

“But I have to put in a huge thank you to the community first responders – the likes of John Webb [a group leader with the Garelochhead and Rosneath Peninsula Community First Responders]. John has attended hundreds of call-outs and something like 30-40 resuscitations.

“That’s a help that the ambulance service never had before. They’re limited in what they can do but it’s a huge help to the ambulance service.”

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Julian may have become Helensburgh’s very first ambulance paramedic 27 years ago, but other colleagues quickly followed suit – to the point where the presence of a paramedic on every ambulance shift working out of Helensburgh is now routine.

“Having paramedics on ambulances had just started when I joined the service,” he said.

“Very quickly I thought ‘this is fantastic, this is something I want to do’, but you had to do two years on the road before you were allowed to apply to be a paramedic - it was a very thorough thing.

“They wanted the best of the best to get through – it was viewed as such an honour to be a paramedic.

“Now the Helensburgh station has a paramedic on every shift.

“That was the ambulance service’s vision for the millennium – they didn’t quite reach that goal everywhere, but we did in Helensburgh.

“We’ve always had a good, strong unit in Helensburgh. It’s a popular station – people always want to come and work in nice surroundings and in a nice area.

“Sometimes, in the city, it’s drunk after drunk after drunk, or drugs, drugs, drugs, but that’s not the case in Helensburgh.

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“I’ve been called to plenty of nasty incidents in Helensburgh in my time, but those have definitely died down in the last few years.

“There are still occasional pockets – most often it’s somebody who’s overdosed on drugs, but the number of incidents relating to violence has definitely dropped.

“We also have a great relationship with the fire service and, particularly, with the police – they are great allies because we work so closely together.”

Once retirement – besides those ‘bank’ shifts – arrives properly, Julian is looking forward to spending more time fly-fishing, walking in the hills, playing with his band, Cousin Halifax, and enjoying the company of his family – wife Laura, a school nurse based in the Jeanie Deans Unit next to Helensburgh’s ambulance station, children Nicola, Aidan and Michael, and the couple’s four grandchildren.

Reflecting on how 27 years as an ambulance paramedic is definitely not just like any other job, he added: “The most important thing is being able to help people. That’s what you’re there for.

“It’s been an honour to be able to help. Working with so many talented and committed doctors and nurses has been an honour – most are fantastic people to work with.

“We’re there to help those in need, and that’s been the biggest privilege of all.”

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