‘If It Was Easy Somebody Would Have Fixed It’: An Exploration of Loneliness and Social Isolation Amongst People Who Frequently Call Ambulance Services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The aim of the study was to explore social isolation and loneliness in those who frequently contacted the ambulance service, what factors contributed to this and how unmet needs could be addressed. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews with staff from the ambulance service and service users who were identified as frequently contacting the ambulance service. Service users also completed the UCLA loneliness scale and personal community maps. Data were analysed thematically before triangulation with the UCLA loneliness scale and personal community maps. RESULTS: The final analysis was drawn from 15 staff and seven service user participants. The relationship between social isolation and loneliness and contacting the ambulance service was a contributing, but not the driving, factor in contacting the ambulance service. For service users, we identified three key themes: (1) impact on activities of daily living and loneliness and/or isolation as a result of a health condition; (2) accessing appropriate health and social care services to meet needs; (3) the link between social isolation and/or loneliness and contact with the ambulance service. The analysis of staff data also highlighted three key themes: (1) social isolation and/or loneliness in their role; (2) access to other appropriate health and social care services; (3) the impact of austerity and Covid-19 on social isolation and/or loneliness. CONCLUSIONS: Our research emphasises the complex nature of social isolation and loneliness, including the cyclic nature of poor health and social isolation and loneliness, and how this contributes to contact with the ambulance service. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION: The advisory group for the study was supported by a public and patient representative who contributed to the design of the study documentation, data analysis and authorship.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".