Page 4162 - Week 12 - Thursday, 1 December 2022
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six years too many, in my opinion. I asked my staff to go back through the annual reports to see how many additional staff had been employed in the past six years—noting that this is not replacements but additional staff.
The minister said in the Assembly on 4 August 2022 that they had employed 53 new paramedics between the last term and to date. To be fair, he did not say “additional”. After all, if you are making the point that you are listening to the needs of the paramedic community, and they are asking for extra paramedics to assist with rostering issues, the expectation is that they will get extra paramedics. However, that is not what we found when we went digging.
Of course, I only have the government’s own annual reports to go by. However, the numbers are quite revealing. Let me read them out. From 2016 to 2018, the service actually lost 18 ambulance officers. From 2017 to 2019, the service again lost an ambulance officer, so there were no increases. From 2018 to 2020, the service finally gained 30 ambulance officers, but it should be remembered that there were 19 lost in the previous two years, so it is really only an increase of 11. From 2019 to 2021, the service gained another 18 ambulance officers. In the past financial year, the service gained another five.
Using the minister’s own time period, over that time, according to the annual reports, there have been exactly 34 additional new ambulance officers employed. That is not enough. As I mentioned in my response to this year’s budget, it was disappointing to again see no real additional promise of more frontline crew.
Yes, new staff have been promised, but it is divided between the much-needed PACER crews and some unspecified number of intensive care paramedics, as well as more call centre staff. There is, again, a complete lack of detail, and detail is what we want—the paramedics working long shifts and the Canberra community who are waiting long hours for an ambulance to attend to them.
Someone listening to this may well wonder why we need more frontline crew. I was staggered by a statistic posted on the ambos’ ACT Facebook page, which showed a comparison between paramedics in Australia and New Zealand. On average, ambulance officers in Australia attend six patients every minute, compared to their counterparts in New Zealand, who attend one patient per minute.
Again, a quick review of the annual reports confirms that the level of work that paramedics do is overwhelming and increasing. There has been an increase in the number of incidents, on average, every year for the past six years, with 5,000 more medical incidents reported. The last year has been the most significant, with an 11 per cent increase in incidents reported.
What is also concerning about these numbers is that the number of incidents responded to has dropped. Whilst previously the number of incidents and responses ran fairly evenly, in the past year, for example, there were 75,698 medical incidents reported but only 63,614 were responded to. It begs the question: what happened to the other 12,084 callers? Were they ignored? Were they told to make their own way to hospital? I would love to hear the minister explain those numbers.
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