Page 233 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 13 February 1991
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unexpected, to find the Opposition refusing to give the Government any credit for having increased ambulance staff numbers over that time. But the fact is that it has.
Overall the service has an adequate staff resource base and I have received no requests from the service to provide staff in excess of the current 69 officers. I should emphasise that point very clearly. The service, however, is still experiencing some staff deployment difficulties due to factors which I will go through in a moment and which are not related to the Government's level of support - and that level of support is committed by the Government time and again. Those factors I refer to are as follows: First of all, the Government is currently funding 48 ambulance officer positions, while the service requires the following numbers: Obviously one requires 32 ambulance officer rostered positions on duty for any given period of time; 12 relief ambulance officers to cover leave and training commitments; and four further officers available for temporary sick leave and other leave absences - making a total of 48, and that is, as I said, the current capacity of the service.
Currently the service has the following level of absences: there are 11 officers absent on sick or workers compensation leave; two officers are absent on maternity leave; and there are two vacancies due to resignations received in the last two weeks. It is amazing how Mr Berry is happy to pounce the moment that a vacancy arises because of resignations and decry the Government for not acting quickly enough to place an advertisement to fill those vacancies. I can indicate that those vacancies will be advertised very shortly.
Mr Berry talks about stress problems associated with the service and makes out that to be the cause of the 11 officers being absent or sick. I emphasise that I would not pretend that nobody ever gets stress leave in the Ambulance Service; of course people do. In any position as challenging as that, of course that is quite possible. But, in fact, many of the present leave entitlements that are being used are associated as much with upgrading training and professional changes in the service as they are with stress. That is an important part of the evolution of the service that I think we ought to bear in mind. While the current absence factor that I referred to is a problem for the day to day deployment of staff, the service still has the capacity to meet its obligations to the community.
Mr Berry: Rubbish!
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Berry ridicules that fact. I can only emphasise that that is the situation, and when Mr Berry purports to bring forward cases that prove that there is some deficiency in the service he uses a measure which he himself was not able to live up to while he was Minister and which I think he would be very foolish to adopt on a
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