Gifts for paramedics: what a newly qualified paramedic actually uses

What to buy a newly qualified paramedic

The word is NQP. Newly qualified paramedic — the term you will hear in UK ambulance stations for someone in the first stretch after registration. Put that word on the card. It is the whole difference between a present chosen by someone who asked and a present chosen off a search result.

The gift often lands in the same fortnight as a new station and a new rota. The useful one works in week one. The other kind gets admired and shelved.

Five questions, in this order.

• Does it fit a cup holder, a pocket or a locker? If it fits none of those, it lives in the boot.
• Does it survive a car boot in February and the same car boot in July?
• Does it work one-handed, in the dark?
• Does it need a cable that is not already in the car?
• Is it kit? Kit standards are set by the service, not by us, and something bought as a present may not be permitted on duty. Ask before you buy anything that would go in a pocket on shift.

Why a flask beats a mug

A mug is a station object. It lives on a shelf, it gets washed by somebody who does not own it, and it never leaves the building. That is fine as a present. It is just not a present that travels.

A flask travels. Buy it on measurements rather than on the photograph. Check the diameter against the cup holder in the vehicle they will actually be sitting in. Check the lid opens one-handed. Check the lid comes apart to be washed, because the part that cannot be taken apart is the part that goes off.

Ours is £28, made to order, dispatched within 10 working days. We have not published a measured height and diameter for it yet. If the cup holder is the deciding factor, buy on the measurement — ours or anyone else's.

What not to buy

The gifts that fail are not the cheap ones. They are the ones that have to be carried, charged, explained, or eaten to a schedule.

That last one earns its own section.

• Anything carrying a service crest, badge or trust logo. We put no service insignia on anything we make, and a gift should not carry one either — it is not ours to use and it is not yours.
• A presentation hamper the size of a boot. It has to leave the station at the end of a twelve-hour shift, in one trip, usually in the rain.
• Anything perishable that has to be eaten the day it lands. Rotas do not cooperate.
• Novelty kit that is funny once and then occupies a locker.
• Anything engraved with a job title before you are certain which title is right.

Get the job title right

Paramedic is a protected title. It is not a general word for anybody on an ambulance. A technician, an ECA and an ACA are different roles with different training, and putting the wrong one in a card is the sort of thing that gets read out in a mess room for a fortnight.

If you are not certain, name the service and leave the title off. Congratulations plus the service name is hard to get wrong. Avoid the American terms completely — they are the fastest way to show that a gift was chosen by somebody who has never stood in a station.

That goes for the American catch-all for anybody who turns up first, too. It is not a job title here. Name the service, or say on shift.

Gift picks, including the ones we do not sell

Five of these you can buy from us. The rest you cannot, and two of those beat anything we make for the job described. Whole bean or any grind is the same price, so if you do not know whether they own a grinder, pick a grind.

• A vacuum flask bought on measurements

  Get the one that fits their cup holder, even when that one is not ours.

• Blue Light Blend, 250g£16.50

  The house blend, being built medium-dark and low in acid so it goes flat rather than sour if it sits in a jug.

• Graveyard Blend, 250g£16.50

  The darker of the two, being built with fifteen per cent Indian robusta by weight of green coffee before roasting, to be declared on the pack. Low in acid, heavy in the cup, and it survives a flask.

• Coffee Club, ten bags£140

  A one-off run of ten 250g bags at £14 a bag, delivered, and the ten together earn 250g for a station mess room you name.

• Insulated flask£28

  Ours, made to order, dispatched within 10 working days, and no service insignia on it anywhere.

• Beanie£18

  Ours, made to order, our own mark and nobody else's, for the walk across a car park in February.

• A boot crate with a lid, not from us

  Everything they own ends up in a car boot, and a crate that does not slide about is worth more than it sounds.

• A decaf, not from us yet

  Off Duty is our decaf, a single origin with the caffeine taken out using water rather than solvents, and it is not in the first roast — if decaf is the gift, buy it from somebody who has it today.

• Nothing, and a lift in for an 06:00 start

  Costs nothing and beats half this list.

Gifts policies, and the answer that avoids the whole problem

Ambulance services, trusts and forces set their own gifts and hospitality policies. They differ, they get updated, and they belong to the recipient's employer, not to us. Check theirs before you buy. We will not print a value threshold on this page, because we do not get to set one and any number we invented would be wrong somewhere. None of this is legal advice — the policy that binds is the one the recipient's employer publishes.

There is a way round most of it. Send coffee to the mess room instead of to a person. A bag shared by whoever is on shift is a different proposition from a parcel handed to an individual, and it is often the shorter conversation. Ask anyway.

If your family wants to send something to a crew after a job, that is the version we would suggest. Address it to the mess room. Leave the names off it.

It is also how our own give-back runs. Every ten 250g bags sold send 250g to a UK emergency services mess room — forty bags send a full kilo. We expect that to come to around 100kg in the first year. That figure is a projection, not a cap: sell past the plan and the tenth bag keeps going, still one in ten.

Credits accumulate and ship in consolidated runs once a station's share reaches 4kg, addressed to the mess room. Stations self-certify: somebody at the station confirms they work there. We publish bags earned and bags delivered with an as-at date, and the counter sits at zero until the first bag ships.

When it would actually arrive

Every order on this site is a pre-order. Nothing is roasted yet. You pay now; then we buy the green through a UK importer and have it roasted in the UK in small batches. Cancel any time before it ships and you get all of it back, no reason needed.

So if the do is next Saturday, buy something else. We would rather write that here than explain it in an email in November.

When it does go: free UK delivery while we launch, UK addresses only for now, tracked. The 250g packs are being made to letterbox size, and we will say plainly that one goes through a letterbox on the day a filled pack has been measured against one, not before.

The roast date will be printed on the front of every bag with a 12-month best-before beside it, both labelled. You will know how old it is without emailing us.