We go through normal seasonal peaks and troughs \u2013 we get lots of respiratory illness through winter \u2013 but the last couple of winters have been particularly busy. I\u2019ve noticed the difficulty that people have trying to get into primary care to see their GP. Even though there\u2019s other options out there, like virtual telehealth GP appointments that are subsidised by Health New Zealand, people either don\u2019t know about them or they prefer the convenience of calling an ambulance. I can call this number, and I might have to wait a few hours, but someone will turn up and assess me. It\u2019s the convenience of having someone come to your door and see you at home, which you won\u2019t get any other way.<\/p>\n
I also find people don\u2019t really know how to make sense of their symptoms any more and there\u2019s a lot of health anxiety. I don\u2019t know but it might be from Covid-19, when people were really worried about complications and dying. People might have a common cold or mild flu with a bit of chest pain because they\u2019ve been coughing, but they think they\u2019re having a heart attack.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A lot of people think what burns us out in our job or makes us change careers is seeing lots of death or trauma, but it\u2019s really not. It\u2019s the stuff we didn\u2019t sign up for, like hospital ramping [when you\u2019re delayed at the hospital for more than 30 minutes from the time you arrive] and going to a lot of low acuity work that doesn\u2019t really need an ambulance response \u2013 but it does, because it\u2019s the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.<\/p>\n
\u2018A lot of people think what burns us out in our job or makes us change careers is seeing lots of death or trauma, but it\u2019s really not.\u2019 (Photo: Getty)<\/p>\n
We spend a lot of our day sitting at hospitals waiting for patients to get beds. Yesterday, I spent two hours waiting to get a bed for my patient, and there were six other crews there also waiting for a bed. Because the patient is still on our stretcher, they\u2019re still in our care. They\u2019ve been triaged and the hospital knows they\u2019re there, but there\u2019s no physical space for nursing staff to look after them.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s a matter of sitting with the patient in a corridor. It\u2019s usually a very cold, draughty corridor with lots of people coming through, so there\u2019s no privacy for the patient, who is sitting on an ambulance or hospital stretcher. We\u2019re having to provide care to those patients in those corridors, which is awful for them and their family, because they don\u2019t know how long they\u2019re going to sit there. It\u2019s not a private place. It\u2019s not very dignified. You can\u2019t have private conversations, because there\u2019s dozens of people around you. You\u2019re sitting there for hours, waiting.<\/p>\n
Sometimes you\u2019re ramping in a less than ideal area, like a corridor between the ambulance bay and resuscitation rooms, far away from staff for extra help. You\u2019ve got no emergency bell if your patients deteriorate. You can\u2019t get help from staff in the hospital. There\u2019s no emergency equipment, so you have to go back to your ambulance to get your gear. That\u2019s when the care starts to slip, and you\u2019re not able to provide that care that you want to.<\/p>\n
In an ideal world, you\u2019ll hand the patient over and they\u2019re in a hospital bed with care of medical staff within an hour of you seeing them. But if you\u2019re ramping with the patient and it\u2019s two, three, four hours down the track where they haven\u2019t been seen by a doctor or assessed by a nurse and they\u2019ve had no tests, patients are often at risk of deterioration. Things aren\u2019t being investigated in a timely manner. You take someone to hospital with chest pain and they need bloods done to see if they\u2019re having a heart attack, and they\u2019re not getting those for a couple of hours after you\u2019ve arrived. It\u2019s just delayed care.<\/p>\n
It can be quite stressful, particularly if there\u2019s been a change in your patient\u2019s condition and you\u2019re trying to escalate that. Sometimes the charge nurse will say, \u201cI hear you. I understand that your patient\u2019s becoming more unwell, but I\u2019ve got nowhere to put them and I\u2019ve got no staff to deal with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Photo: Getty Images<\/p>\n
People are always shocked to learn that we do 12-hour shifts. We do four of them a week, and we get two 30-minute meal breaks in that shift. Sometimes you\u2019ll be out the door at six o\u2019clock in the morning, you have a 30-minute break, and then you might have another one. But today, I didn\u2019t get a second break. If you get a late job, you\u2019ll finish late. It\u2019s very unpredictable. That pattern can be quite fatiguing, and the high workload contributes to that, because there\u2019s no downtime.<\/p>\n
On that weekend of record 111 calls, I watched from afar, thinking, thank goodness I wasn\u2019t at work. But even on my days off, I got several text requests for staff. On my last day off, I got two texts. The day before, I got four texts. A friend sent me another text that said they needed 14 staff for different vehicles because they were single crewed. If you don\u2019t get those staff, those vehicles have to pair up. Then that shift is short of seven ambulances, and that workload has to be picked up by the rest of the ambulances and staff on duty.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a very common occurrence. I don\u2019t think a day off goes by where I don\u2019t get texts, and on other days you get texts asking you to do extra shifts, four or five days in advance. On Saturday night, they sent a text out at 9.15pm asking for officers to assist as soon as possible due to the workload. Who\u2019s taking an extra shift at 9.15pm on a Saturday, on their day off? If they don\u2019t fill those vacancies, we just run short-staffed. The ambulances are parked at a station, not being used, and that\u2019s where you see those clips in the media about someone who\u2019s had to wait on the floor for hours, and a family member has gone past the station and seen the ambulance parked there. It\u2019s probably because there\u2019s no crew.<\/p>\n
Abuse [of ambulance officers] has been ongoing since forever, but thankfully there\u2019s a lot more understanding out there about the workload and the wait times. People understand that it\u2019s not my fault that they\u2019ve had to wait a few hours for an ambulance. I\u2019ve been really busy too, going to patients all day, and I haven\u2019t had a break. They understand that it\u2019s an organisational, systemic problem.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all very political about what to fund and what not to fund. It\u2019s a political decision about how much the government is willing to spend on health, and how much Health NZ is able to spend on the ambulance service. But if you look at the biggest issues we\u2019re facing at the moment, ramping is a hospital problem, not an ambulance problem. It starts at the top \u2013 how much money they spend on beds and hiring nurses. They\u2019ll choose not to and spend the money elsewhere, but you could solve a lot of ramping issues and flow-on effects, so that it trickles down right through the system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a record number of calls to emergency services last week, one ambulance officer talks about the realities…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":574044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[11428,156,134,30035,2241,111,139,69,2935],"class_list":["post-574043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ambulance","tag-entertainment","tag-health","tag-health-nz","tag-hospital","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}