NHS Calls For Volunteer Ambulance Drivers
Volunteers are being asked to drive 999 patients to hospital, as part of efforts to relieve pressures on ambulance services. The Telegraph has more.
The London Ambulance Service (LAS) is to start piloting the system within weeks, as senior doctors warn of “staggeringly bad” delays to emergency care in some parts of the country.
Although volunteers are regularly used by hospitals and charities to take patients to outpatient appointments, this is thought to be the first time that non-professionals will be used to ferry emergency cases.
The ambulance service already sends taxis to take some patients to hospital. The new scheme is aimed at patients who are classed as “category 3” – meaning they should get an urgent response within two hours – and who need help because of mobility problems.
LAS officials said that NHS England is looking to use it as the basis for a “national volunteer transport” system.
Across the country, ambulance response times are the lowest on record, with average waits of more than an hour for heart attack and stroke victims in March, against a target of 18 minutes.
In the capital, average waits for such emergencies were almost 51 minutes, data show.
So far, 22 volunteers have been signed up and trained for the scheme, which is currently using “community first responders” trained by St. John’s Ambulance.
Responders, who have training in emergency first aid, are normally deployed to get to emergency calls quickly and provide on-the-spot help before ambulance crews can get there.
The service told a board meeting last month: “The project is supported by NHS England and NHS Improvement who are looking to implement a national volunteer transport model based on using our model.”
NHS England is understood to have provided £100,000 funding for the pilots, set to be launched in May, using LAS cars based at each of the six ambulance stations across the capital.
The new scheme comes amid warnings of “appalling” waits for ambulances in some parts of the country.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Just as well we saved the NHS and gave it more money- otherwise it would have been so much worse
I wonder how the Swedish NHS is doing
Yes, like all those vaccinated people who succumbed to Covid. At least they were vaccinated, otherwise it would have been much worse.
You are right. Mass death had they not been triple jabbed. As an unvaxxed heretic I have no idea why I’m still alive. It can’t be the healthy diet or the vitamin D and zinc regime I researched. That’s absurd.
Me too.
It’s not vitamin D, C or your zinc. It’s because you never were at risk, you didn’t need to do anything different to what you’d always done to be perfectly safe.
I agree. But if you are going to take steps to counter a virus, whether you are at risk or not, the traditional method is prevention as opposed to an experimental drug whose safety profile is unknown. If you are disinclined to do nothing just in case then that’s the way to go.
I learned through my reading many of us are vitamin D deficient, so it is generally a good discipline for the winter months.
Still not a peep in the legacy media about nutrition, exercise and useful supplements.
Nutrition, exercise and useful supplements fail the BillGatesTest™ in at least two important ways:
It’s why he “gave up” on Africans and Indians. The real reason of course being that they kicked him out.
I’m aware of his Indian and African safaris. I think the general view in India is if he shows up they’ll hang him at the airport.
There is some money to be made. Holland and Barratt would have cleaned up if they’d advertised covid kits with Vitamin D, zinc, Vitamin K and magnesium. I kept waiting to see if they’d do it, but nothing.
The real scandal is the lack of interest in nutrition with doctors. They view it as harmless at best and witchcraft if you insist.
“The real scandal is the lack of interest in nutrition with doctors. They view it as harmless at best and witchcraft if you insist.”
Because their “profession” is totally, and I mean totally, in the pocket of the pharmaceutical sector.
Medicine is a reactive rather than proactive environment. To be fair to doctors they have been trained that way, cure rather than prevent.
Interestingly, however, as I’m now in my 60’s I’ve become aware of a couple of proactive screening measures. Hopefully there are more.
The problem is, as ever, that when the government recognises a medical success (like vaccinations) it will be turned to their political advantage, or disadvantage by their opposition.
H&B provide food supplements. It’s illegal for them to make any claims of a medical nature for their products.
My gp and I used to talk about Michael Gregor’s daily 12 and plant based eating recommendations. Well guess what. My gp saw the writing on the wall and made a bee line for the door sept 2020. I can only think he wanted nothing to do with the administration of dangerous experimental biologicals with minimum safety and efficacy data.
Please can someone put him on the first flight to Delhi?
They not only kicked him out, there is a criminal trial pending for his murder of numerous Indian children.
There is money to be made if you sell healthy food, provide equipment to take exercise (be that walking boots, running kit, swimming costumes, tennis courts, swimming pools etc) or sell ‘natural supplements’.
It may not be the amounts of money that Gates demands, but plenty of people make a decent living from the ‘healthy living industry’.
Vitamin in the right amounts is an excellent idea, Covid scam or no Covid scam.
Wha’s the right amount of vitamins?
What the vitamin manufacturers tell you?
Yes there is. April 21, 2020, Daily Mail, page 43: “How Sunshine Vitamin Is A Bright New Hope To Fight The Crisis”.
I don’t know if they’ve had new instructions since then…
How anti-inflammatory sunshine vitamin could help you fight off coronavirus | Daily Mail Online
here is a unique idea, it probably would not hurt if GP’s and other docs dealing with HUMANS recommend Vit D, exercise, fresh air and a healthy diet. Wouldn’t that make a refreshing change. The only weapon in the arsenal appears to be a very dangerous experimental biological which we now know causes severe harm and death. Cdc VAERS 27,000deaths over one million adverse events, underreporting factor of 41.
I recommended it 2 years ago. Of course, I am not a GP and am not medically trained (although I was a molecular biologist working in a medical field for 10 years).
You don’t need to pay someone £100k to give such basic advice. 90% of successful parents will be giving it to their children for nothing.
Indeed. A scam won’t kill you unless you believe in it and get yourself injected with the poison death shots
A sensible post. Too much nonsense about vitamins C and D and zinc… what about vitamins A, B2, B6, B12 and E? Never get a mention! Neither do all the other chemical elements such as iron, cadmium, sulphur, chromium, iodine, potassium…. why just ‘zinc’?
Maybe add selenium to the list?
I agree to an extent. For me personally I am almost never sick so I think any vitamins that I have started taking in the last few years are potentially getting falsely credited for my good health. However, my partner often gets sick with a cold for a week or so a year. Since starting with the vitamins she has only had 2 days with a bit of a sore throat and some mild coughing. They do help, but the effect is likely small to moderate. It’s not likely to transform you from a sickly person to someone who has a bulletproof immune system, but I believe it can help you shrug off things a bit easier
Marginal gains is what you need:
The more of those you do, the better your immune system will be.
It can’t be the healthy diet or the vitamin D and zinc regime I researched. That’s absurd.
Or it might be that not going with a scam is good for your health.
It’s probably getting outdoors for exercise in nice sunny weather. April 2022 is just like April 2020 – perfect weather to get outdoors, take exercise, build up tolerance for the sunshine and synthesise vitamin D naturally.
Why can’t they drive themselves as it’s Less Serious?
Well, there’s the carparking for a start. If you’d managed to get down there and then not been able to drive for six weeks due to abdominal surgery, I’d hate to think what the bill would be!
You are accidentally correct.
That’s right, dying of covid without being vaccinated is much worse, apparently.
Fancy dying without having paid your dues to Big Pharma and Billy Gates.
You are not accidentally here.
Obviously we’re not giving it enough.
£140 billion a year apparently isn’t enough to cover ambulance drivers.
I’ve got an idea. Why don’t they get some of the management and admin staff which actually make up the majority of the employees of the NHS and get them to drive the ambulances?
Well with much much higher level of funding than the UK, what do you think?
And every country in the world has imposed the NHS on its population. Not…….
The first rule of a failing organisation is never to give it more money as the reason it is failing is that it doesn’t know how to spend money appropriately.
What’s needed is not more money but proper management. AND a removal of the right of the security services to plant moles into the NHS, not to mention gain permission from hospital seniority to ‘interview’ patients without revealing formally who they are.
I wouldn’t describe myself as a sociopath but that’s funny!
Mind you, I suspect that even Bozo wouldn’t describe himself as a sociopath!
Sociopaths would rarely describe themselves as such.
Including you.
A lack of drivers, how did that happen?
Just as we have an “unexpected” rise of heart attacks and strokes!
Nothing to see here, move along.
There is a war on you know, and the climate, we have to save that too, very important we focus on these current topics and ignore any past transgressions.
Talking about trans……
Mediocrity is difficult to hide. That’s all we are seeing. Given how much NHS administrators are paid, why are they not anticipating this kind of thing?
I don’t understand what you are saying.
I clapped and banged pans, every Thursday night to save muh NHS.
Are you implying that didn’t work?
You clearly didn’t bang the pots and pans hard enough. Next time try a rain dance. They work.
If it doesn’t approve we’ll need to move on to sacrificing children to appease the gods. Oh wait, they’ve already announced that…
Think how bad it would have been if people didn’t bang the pots and pans?
At least I’m saving lives!
I did the ritual hand clapping, but I did it for the many hard working people who staff the NHS. I certainly didn’t do it for the NHS.
The original purpose, as I recall, was begun by a single lady and was for NHS staff until the government and the BBC hijacked it as a celebration of the NHS.
That’s when I quit clapping.
You can now donate your pans for the Ukrainian war effort.
Are they building Spitfires?
Nope. £6m homes, like they did for BLM.
Mediocrity is something NHS management excels at.
I disagree. They strive for it but seldom achieve it.
They operate on a fixed budget. If it were a private enterprise, they would hire more drivers because more ambulance trips = more revenue which would cover increased payroll expense + profit.
This is something that people seem incapable of understanding. Fixed budget with no income means you can’t just spend more when demand increases.
Hence waiting lists.
They operate on a fixed budget. If it were a private enterprise, they would hire more drivers because more ambulance trips = more revenue which would cover increased payroll expense + profit. A sufficiently small private enterprise, ie, one where the people running day-to-day operation actually care for increased revenue and where they’re not being held back by some enterprise internal bureaucracy fixated on proper procedures might do that. A real-world example of private enterprise I encountered yesterday was: After work, I usually go to a certain Wetherspoon pub to have a couple of pints, something I’ve been doing for about a decade now. On Sundays, it’s, due to the upcoming working week, usually very quiet there. OTOH, considering that today is a bank holiday, yesterday, it really wasn’t, although the place was by no means crowded. One would naively assume a manager running the place would be inclined to think as folllows: “Monday is a bank holiday. Hence, it’ll probably be much busier than usual on Sunday. I’ll need to bring a few more staff in because of that so that we can make the most out of it!”. Of course, the responsible manager did nothing of that sort.… Read more »
I would agree size is one of the main determinants. I’ve worked in Tier 1 banks and they are as bad as the public sector.
But with wetherspoons you have a choice. You can choose a competitor. That is the key advantage of a market.
Banks work on much the same principle as governments, a captive audience.
The stakes are therefore being raised. Government mandated NetZero will compel us all to spend £150,000+++++++ on our ‘average family home’ (e.g. three bedroom semi) by 2050 to achieve the required standard.
Guess who hands out all the loans for that? Yep, Banks.
Many people north of the Watford gap have ‘average family homes’ worth not much more than £150,000.
Can someone explain to me why this isn’t just government sponsored racketeering?
One of my local Wetherspoons can’t be bothered to invest in a set of blinds for the much coveted window booth seats. It’s a bit off putting sipping one’s pint of 6.6% Leffe with the sun blaring in one’s eyes.
‘Needed’ cos 50% of paramedics are ‘off sick’ with ‘the sniffles’, aka ‘COVID’. Note that historically NHS staff (I was told this on several occasions by staff I’d worked with on engineering projects) – the same as many Civil Servants – routinely use their contracturally allowable annual sick leave (best part of 3-4 weeks pa) as extra holidays.
Oddly enough they were most often ‘sick’ on Fridays, Mondays and over public holidays. The managemnet were (and I suspect are still) scared to push back because of the power of the Unions.
I’d put good money on staff working solely for private hospitals having a FAR lower sickness rate, including for ‘COVID’.
Although in Education rather than health, trainee teachers are permitted 30 days absence in their first year before questions are asked.
Sick leave in the NHS is up to 6 months on full pay and then up to 6 months at half pay, dependent on length of service.
However, if you are off sick for any length of time then you are subject to a sickness review, unless the sick leave is due to an existing long term condition such as asthma or diabetes or depression.
If you have more than 2 or 3 periods of sick leave within a period of time, 6 or 12 months say, depends on the trust, then you will have a sickness review and probably given a “target” of 1 sickness in the next 6 months, excluding sickness due to existing long term conditions, due to the equality legislation.
Ultimately, you could be dismissed.
I suspect that may not have been so rigorously enforced over the past 2 years.
Plenty of scope there to fame the system.
“… or depression”.
Why doesn’t everybody go off sick with depression, as Boris & his sidekick Rishi have made the whole country a depressing place to exist in?
I should have actually put mental ill health, rather than specifically depression. Having had time off myself with anxiety and depression, to the point of having suicidal ideation, in the past, it can be as debilitating as a physical illness.
It can be debilitating, and I have every sympathy for you and other sufferers. However, I was going through a tough time with work and divorce in the mid 80’s and visited my doctor with a chronic back condition.
He signed me off sick with depression!
Didn’t help my back, but did wonders for my social life.
Most, if not all, patient transport ambulance crews are employed by the private sector. There are far more patient transport ambulance crews than emergency crews.
The ‘punishment’ for going off sick by private sector ambulance operators are many and varied, including not paying personnel. It’s a zero hours, gig occupation. Imagine that, getting cared for by a Deliveroo employee.
These are the people the NHS ‘trust’ to look after you on your routine journeys to and from hospital.
It’s astonishing that the NHS has moved fro its original position of being a provider of essential care, to one that panders to everyones slightest needs.
I was a patient transport ambulance driver but I saw no reason for my employment other than the overreach of the welfare state.
Whilst we can’t have people dying alone at home, nor can we have battalions of ambulances running a bus service for patients, many of whom are perfectly capable of reaching a local hospital under their own steam.
Despite having an enormously greater number of staff in the public sector and despite their failure to keep up to date with their work, they now want volunteers to cover their deficiencies. Is there no limit to their cheek?
Yes. The limit is called a market. That’s how it is kept in check. Monopolies don’t last.
They do if they are uncontestsble by law.
Yes indeed.
Privatising the NHS wouldn’t break the power of pharmaceutical interests and their little helpers the General Medical Council and the editors of “research” journals.
Breaking up Standard Oil – a key moment in Rothschild-backed Rockefeller interests “diversifying” by establishing the modern pharmaceutical-dominated “medical industrial sector” – didn’t “work” if viewed as an anti-monopoly move.
That’s a very good point.
However, I defy anyone to provide me an example of where the NHS isn’t a private enterprise other than, perhaps, directly employed doctors and nurses.
The buildings are built on private land bought fro a land speculator. Every piece of equipment/clothing etc. is sourced from a private business.
Even the car parks are private, as are the cleaning and catering staff.
The bloody GP’s and Consultants are privately employed.
Nothing about the NHS is public other than the politics.
Next up: NHS calls for volunteer doctors and nurses. No experience needed: just good dancing skills
These are not emergency cases but urgent (non blue light), typically GP originated.
Volunteer organisations such as St John Ambulance regularly provide blue light services, although they do not have paramedic training but have basic life support with automatic defibrillator training.
Patient transport services in my area of the East Midlands has been contracted out.
Thank you, a fellow traveller. All patient transport services in my experience, and as a matter of NHS policy, are contracted out.
The reason it was contracted out is, it was shit under the NHS. It can only be described as private shit now.
I was a patient transport ambulance driver for some months. Volunteers will make it shitter.
I can see the desperate need for this. Around the corner from our local NHS hospital is a BP Connect with M&S food outlet. Judging by the many ambulances parked in this car park with our NHS heroes sitting in their cabs scoffing doughnuts and downing lattes, I can sympathise that they have no time for real patients.
Consider that they are forced to sit in an ambulance, in a petrol station, scoffing doughnuts and Latte’s, rather than having a lunch break in a cafeteria provided for that purpose. I was a patient transport Ambulance driver and our ‘cafeteria’ was a single round table with a couple of plastic chairs, surrounded by lockers, in a portakabin, with a grotty microwave which was not part of the cleaners remit, shared by at least 16 people. And we wonder why the NHS is having to rely on volunteers. I can promise you, they will get equally pissed off with those conditions and won’t last more than 6 months. We have hit NHS rock bottom when volunteers are required. I have no time for unions, nor have I time for a ‘public’ NHS as neither have stemmed the tide of NHS employee abuse over the years, whether public or private. No other country in the world, as far as I know, has adopted the NHS model (with the possible exception of Cuba) because it is utter shit. My late father in law, a UN official, was given the grand tour of one of Cuba’s finest hospitals by Fidel himself, and he said… Read more »
If you have paid attention to the international media over the last week you will see that there has been a very sudden and drastic rise in people suffering heart attacks and strokes and requiring immediate assistance.Reports out of Germany and Australia. You could just look at this as a minor blip but I would suggest that if you do so then you are unable to face reality. I know we have had an easy time of it in the west over the last seventy years but better to stare the cold hard truth in the face surely. It was never going to last forever.
Right! I’ll be there just as soon as my ambulance is charged!
The availability of ambulances misses most of the point. Even if you had ten times more ambulances the procedures required upon arrival aren’t procedures that can be addressed in an acute setting.
‘Across the country, ambulance response times are the lowest on record…’
Don’t they mean ‘highest’?
Longest, perhaps?
That would be the correct choice of grammar, but we are talking MSM where they don’t do grammar cos it’s racists, elitist… something.
Writing “longest” rather than “lowest” is a choice of diction, not grammar. 🙂
NHS trust sees heart failure referrals jump from 63 in 2020 to 603 in 2021 with 104 in 2022 to February alone.
Oh no a DavidIcke.com link! try not to wet your sceptical knickers.
Perhaps if they had not mandated Covid vaxxes they would not have lost so many ambulance crews!!
I await the screeching of “Privatisation by the back door!” and calls to down-tools by Unite.
They may actually have a point. You could employ two or three drivers for every Diversity Director. It’s not like Our Holy Church of NHS is short of money. So why “volunteers”?
And given that the Church is always two weeks from collapse, when will the need for them end?
More Ambulance drivers will not solve the problem. They’ll just end up queueing with the rest for hours. Although, belatedly some attempt is being made to increase bed capacity it’s a bit late in the day. Three reasons I can think of why we have reached this perilous situation, firstly, backlog due to lockdowns, secondly, adverse reactions to the jabs including poor immunity and thirdly isolating patients who were admitted for other reasons because of a positive PCR test.
What’s the point of this? Unless you can get the ‘patient’ into the hospital, where they can be assessed and treated… at the moment ambulances aren’t available precisely because they cannot discharge their patients into A+E and get back ‘online’; the last time I went past my local hospital, there were fifteen ambulances lined up outside. This will jus add more sitting in a car to those numbers.
The problem is what’s happening inside the hospital, not outside… and it’s not that there isn’t enough diversity!
The problem is, what’s classed as an emergency patient.
You’re spot on, pjar. 9 years ago my husband died because there were no ambulances available, most of them were queued up outside hospitals waiting to transfer patients. At the Inquest all sorts of promises were made that lessons had been learnt and things would improve……..
Volunteers???
Why?
The NHS has many thousands of managerial staff who do f*** all………most of whom are probably still ‘working’ from home.
Time for them to organise a roster of these lazy parasitic b*****s to get some real work done.
You’re missing the point. The treatment isn’t avaliable even if they turn up at the hospital pronto. We are talking about levels of injury that we have no remedy for. Complete destruction of organ tissue. It is hard to tell anyone anything but just consider how many insects you came across ten years ago to how many you come across now. Just open your eyes.
WhaTF?!!!!!
Insectageddon – the result of EU agricultural policy on the ecosystem. I never understood why the Green Party were so pro-EU.
You can’t just turn up and offer to help. There are many protocols that you have to follow in terms of picking people up off the street. Really if you think this approach is viable then consider it in terms of yourself. Some random ambulance crew just picking you up off the street.I have wondered before what the English will do in order to save money. Thay have reached their laughable destination now.
Oh really?
What would they be?
Save a few bob who cares!
You watch your weakest just rot on the streets and now you are considered among the weakest, I wonder how that will go.
Is it my fault the weakest on the street just rot? Or theirs?
And if you are driving an emergency case, and the victim dies en route, or suffers damage from oxygen starvation, or something, you get sued, yes?
People die. Get used to it.
(no sarcasm intended).
Scotch Freedom Day muzzle report: even 50/50 split between rational folk vs Branch Covidian faithful.
Notable mentions to the True Follower of The Science either still muzzled devoutly in the middle of nowhere, or with them tucked under their chins as a talisman in busy shops. Possibly to catch their tears of disappointment that even Kween Krankie has become a heretic now.
Was in a cafe today in Glasgow. About 75% of those entering put their mask on outside the door to get to their seat. Last week it was probably 98%.
A generous interpretation would be they have been traumatized by the propaganda.
I predict it will drop off to low numbers until Wee Jimmy announces the next variant at which point I will predict close to 90% adoption. So much for the fierce Scots.
And we’ll roll out all the pictures of her “forgetting” over and over that the deadliest pandemic ever is raging, and the Branch Covidians will just shake their heads and tut at our foolish belief that the coofs can harm the faithful.
I met up with a mate of mine after more than 30 years for coffee in a hotel close to Buchanan Galleries car park. Glasgow is as much a mystery to me now as London was when I moved down here 34 years ago.
I was surprised that no one in the hotel bothered with a mask other than front of house staff. The trendy cafe bar was upstairs (there was a soft toy giraffe as an ornament as I recall) and I don’t think the waitresses were muzzled.
In years gone by we would have met in a pub, but it was refreshingly civilised not to be pissed out wur heids after a truly excellent night.
Visited Edinburgh last week and was challenged once to put on a mask and it was to enter a whisky shop. I explained that in Middle England we no longer wore masks and if his worked why did I have to wear one, but he said ‘Nicola says’. I am sorry to admit my desire to purchase alcohol overcame my mask wearing belligerence.
Time to stop deifying the NHS and start breaking it up, it is an abhorrent waste of money.
Just open it up to competition. No need to break up anything or privatise. Let the market sort it out.
Giving taxpayers (not that I don’t say patients) the option to take our money to private providers will solve it pretty sharpish.
Too many females in the health service, especially GPs, who don’t work more than part time. That’s one of the reasons for the staff shortages you won’t ever hear mentioned. Part of the cost of utopia, and a total lack of common sense. Human life in this case.
It has long been observed the more female doctors you train the more doctors you need overall. If you can earn £80,000 pa working part time why work full time?
Quality, not quantity mate. Two experiences of mine.
I accepted as a young man that dental treatment came with excruciating pain despite local anaesthesia. The first female dentist I visited identified I had ‘crossed nerves’ in my mouth. For the first time in 30 years I wasn’t ripping the arms off the chair when having a filling.
The second experience was when I was being prepped for a replacement hip a couple of years ago. I contracted a disgusting skin condition on the soles of my feet. My hip was secondary to the pain it induced. I went for an assessment for my hip, hobbled in and, to cut a long story short, the female nursing staff went berserk at the state of my feet, whilst a male orthopaedic surgeon dismissed it as trivial.
I couldn’t have given a flying monkeys about my hip at that point.
I wound up in my GP’s surgery twice. The male GP I saw said I should go to hospital to have it checked, Duh! The second GP, a female, identified it as Eczema and gave me a tube of cream. Job done.
The NHS is one of the largest employers in the world — I’m surprised they’ve not got some useless managers that could drive the ambulances.
I am sure they do have
Surely their diversity coordinators ought to be first in line?
Rather too much danger of having to actually meet the people that they’ve agitating on behalf of.
Get their hands dirty. Heaven forbid, they have university degrees.
Rather points up what plenty are saying – despite thousands of pointless managers, the NHS is a dysfunctional, rapidly failing, disaster soaking up tax payers money for a poor return.
I’d be happier if they’d announce a National Volunteer Manager scheme, and left the ambulance driving to paid professionals.
There might even be a net benefit, as people with experience from the real-world could go in and solve some of their atrocious management issues.
Volunteer anythings are a liability. They have no reason to get things right as they don’t risk their livelihood or reputation if they screw up.
Volunteering is an exercise in virtue promotion. If one has to volunteer then one is clearly not worth employing.
I can see the next piece of MSM propaganda coming into focus….it’s…..
‘Twisted anti-vaxxers are prank calling 999 causing huge ambulance delays’.
“There are no words harsh enough for these people” According to Sharon Wantbottom, an NHS call centre responder who has missed key time with her family to put in extra hours during the pandemic. “We’ve all made sacrifices over the last two years, it’s been tough for everyone. These idiot anti-vaxxers are calling 999 pretending to be injured after taking the injection. It’s one thing to spread dangerous information on the internet but this is affecting people in the real world who are having to wait longer for an ambulance they desperately need.”
Segway into the online safety bill and kill two birds with one stone….