Nice to see the Illawarra’s paramedics are in line for a funding boost in next week’s state budget.
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Overall, NSW Ambulance personnel and infrastructure will receive a $150 million cash injection which will enable an upgrade of Berry Ambulance Station and the continued operation of the Ambulance Helicopter Retrieval Network base at Wollongong Airport.
On the face of it, this sounds like a great boost to the men and women who are often first on the scene when everything goes to hell.
In addition to the 35 extra specialist paramedics announced recently, the government will fund the recruitment of 85 new paramedics across the state.
Good, eh? Well, not so fast: health unions say this will amount to just eight extra ambulances on the road across the entire state.
Furthermore, the Health Services Union says the budget boost will do little to cut waiting times for ambulance arrivals.
In fact unions say an extra 800 paramedics are needed in order to bring down code one call-out waiting times.
Simply put, our paramedics are massively overstretched.
I have a number of good friends who are paramedics and all of them affirm what the HSU says.
But while these guys (and a gal) all say the biggest problems they face at work are related to administration, another niggling problem is the number of “goomers” who add to the overall burden on resources.
“What’s a goomer?” I asked my mate Roy, a veteran paramedic.
“It’s an acronym used to describe people who come to the E.R. with a headache or a sore toe. G.o.o.m.e.r - it stands for Get. Out. Of. My. Emergency. Room.”
Roy has worked in metropolitan areas but is now based in a rural NSW town.
Whenever I call for a chat I ask him how work is going. Only a couple of days ago I inquired if he’d had any interesting jobs.
“Interesting? Let’s see, there was the guy who called an ambulance to the servo on the highway the other night. He had sore feet and wanted a lift.”
As usual I listened to the story, dumbfounded.
It turns out the “patient” had decided to walk from one town to the next in bare feet. After an hour or so he decided he couldn’t go on.
When Roy and his partner arrived at the service station, the man informed these highly trained, battle-hardened medicos that he couldn’t walk due to his hurty feet.
He then demanded to be taken by ambulance to the next town – which happened to be his destination.
“I told him I wasn’t going to do that and he fired up and said ‘Well, I’ve called you so you HAVE to take me!’” said Roy.
“So I told him no again and he said ‘Well if you don’t take me I’m going to go and lie down in the middle of the highway.’”
Roy informed the man if he did indeed prostrate himself on the Princes Highway then he’d be forced to inform his mate Ando, the local copper, and an arrest and time in the lock-up likely would follow.
“In the end we drove away and left him there with his sore feet, but you’d be amazed how many people treat us like a taxi service.”
Others are just plain stupid.
Being a country ambo, Roy is often on call, which means he goes to bed with the ambulance parked in the driveway and a pair of overalls by the front door.
Any time someone calls 000, Roy gets a call at home and has to leap out of bed, pull on the overalls like Superman and race to the rescue.
About 2am on one such night, Roy was indeed summoned by an “emergency” call to assist a 26-year-old woman - with a pimple on her bum.
“I’m dead serious,” he said. “I drove 20 minutes in the rain to get there, knocked on the door and asked her what the problem was.
“She said she had a big pimple on her arse and I said, ‘You may well have ma’am but what do you want me to do about it?”
“She said, ‘Can you look at it?’ and I said no. But she was adamant that someone look at this pimple and so I told her I could take her to hospital if that’s what she wanted.
“Know what she said? She said ‘OK.’ Now that’s a goomer.”
Another ambo mate told me about the patient who called 000 because she had trouble breathing.
“When we got there she’s smoking a durry, there’s 80 butts in the ashtray and the windows are all closed,” my friend explained.
“Mate, I had trouble breathing in that unit, let alone her. But of course she made us drive her to hospital.”
While the government should be doing more to address waiting times and take pressure off our brave and dedicated paramedics, the public can do their bit to help, too.
If you have sore feet, sit down. If you have a pimple on your bum, go back to sleep.
Whatever you do, don’t ever call an ambulance unless it’s for a medical emergency.
Loser of the Week
For a while now I’ve been tossing up whether to include a “winner and loser of the week” item in this column.
Well, Tasmanian Family First Senate candidate Peter Madden has forced my hand.
The rivers of blood in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub had barely stilled when Madden - a renowned anti-gay campaigner - decided to share his thoughts about the massacre on Twitter.
“Though Orlando is abhorrent, it doesn’t change the real & present dangers of the gay marriage agenda to Aus children,” Madden wrote.
So, there you have it: the slaughter of 50 people in a gay nightclub shouldn’t deter bigotry in Australia ... or something, I think ... it’s not really clear.
But anyways, for using an unspeakable human tragedy to push his brand of politics, Madden has earned my inaugural Loser of the Week gong.
Winner of the Week goes to everyone in Australian politics who isn’t Peter Madden.