Why is nobody home?

When I was in civilian service back in 2015, I had an interesting transport home. The switch to a new mission control system (call-taking, navigation, dispatch, …) wasn’t done yet and so everything was dispatched via phone.

We got a call by our dispatch that let us know that we had to drive a patient home from the hospital. Nothing special. We drove to the hospital, I entered the address that was written on our transport protocol in our TomTom and my driver for the day started driving.

I wasn’t allowed to drive with patients back then. I think it was in one of the first months after the paramedic test. We arrived at the house and nobody was there. The patient didn’t have a key so my driver started to call our dispatch.

Then called the hospital to cross-check the address. After about an hour, we were still sitting there waiting for someone to show up, dispatch called again and told us the number of the son of the patient.

My driver called and asked why there was nobody at home. It turned out that the patient we transported was highly demented and didn’t know he was moved to a care centre years before.

We drove there and saw that they thought our patient was gone missing. The sad thing is, that as often we asked the patient if he was living at the house we were standing he said yes. If the hospital would have told us that the patient was dement we hadn’t counted his opinion about where he lives in the first place.