Fed-up Paramedics Skip Tough Shifts

The Age

Monday November 24, 2008

By DAN OAKES

AS VIOLENCE on Melbourne's streets spirals out of control, ambulances are sitting idle in garages because exhausted paramedics are refusing to work on Friday and Saturday nights.

The ambulance union says disillusionment with working conditions is causing its members to shy away from working weekend nights, putting the paramedics who do work under intolerable strain.

Five of the 78 ambulances pencilled in for duty in Melbourne on Saturday night were not on the streets because there were not enough paramedics to staff them. On November 14, eight ambulances could not be manned, more than 10 per cent of the total.

Ambulance Employees Australia general secretary Steve McGhie said yesterday that increasing violence towards paramedics and a heavier case load were keeping paramedics at home. "It's just become a situation where in some circumstances it's unpalatable for them to work weekends," he said.

"(Unstaffed ambulances) are not a once off, it's happening regularly on weekends. It's a clear message that something's wrong. Ambos are fatigued, tired, they don't get fed, the workload is enormous, they get abused, there's aggression towards them, and they're fed up with it."

Some paramedics have told The Age that the problem is exacerbated by the recruitment of young paramedics who have come into the service from university, rather than being trained on the job, and are less likely to want to work on the weekends at the expense of their social lives.

Executive general manager of metropolitan operations for Ambulance Victoria, Keith Young, said he had heard anecdotal evidence that younger paramedics were choosing not to work weekend nights, but that a proposed new pay structure could solve this.

Under the current system, penalties are rolled into paramedics' overall salary package and averaged out over the year. However, under a new enterprise bargaining agreement, Ambulance Victoria wants to pay paramedics the base rate and then pay penalties according to the shifts they work.

"We're seeking a fairer system of payment of wages to all the workforce, so people who are working the tough shifts get remunerated appropriately," Mr Young said. He also believes the problem of ambulances sitting empty would be dealt with by a "significant injection" of funds announced by the State Government earlier this year.

An extra 258 paramedics will be taken on this year, feeding an increase of 27 new ambulance teams across the metropolitan region. There will be $185.7million extra funding available to Ambulance Victoria over the next four years.

Paramedics told The Age another problem is the use of mobile intensive care ambulance (MICA) paramedics for relatively minor jobs.

Mr McGhie said the Acute Medical Priority Dispatch System used by the service was "risk averse" and too quick to send MICAs to minor jobs.

He said he was not blaming the call takers or dispatchers as "all they can do is work within the system they've got".

Mr Young said it was a fine balance, and there would always be occasions on which ambulance crews arrived at a job to find it was not as serious as suspected.