NSW paramedics took industrial action for 24 hours starting Monday, refusing to leave their posts to fill gaps at other ambulance stations.
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Paramedics, including those in the Illawarra Shoalhaven, said they would not move from station to station as part of a union campaign to improve emergency responder staffing and pay.
The action is the second in just over a month from the Australian Paramedics Association, which is calling for calling for the government to commit to hiring another 1500 paramedics and to commit to hiring more specialist paramedics.
It comes after figures released last week showed it was taking longer for paramedics to get to emergency and life threatening patients.
According to quarterly figures from the Bureau of Health Information, it took 13.1 minutes for ambulances in Wollongong to reach emergency cases between October and December last year. This was 1.7 minutes longer than it took a year earlier.
Additionally, the figures showed more than half (50.8%) of emergency cases in Wollongong waited longer than the benchmark of 15 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.
For life threatening cases, the average time it took for an ambulance to arrive was 8.6 minute, up 0.4 minutes from the previous year.
Labor's Health spokesman Ryan Park said the figures showed that the state's ambulance service was under enormous strain.
"Emergency cases are classified as priority 1 (P1) by NSW Ambulance and require an immediate response under lights and siren," he said.
"In Wollongong, only 49.2% of P1 calls arrived within 15 minutes."
Responding to the health figures, the state's health department noted that NSW Ambulance also saw an increase of 21.3 per cent in its most critical cases compared with the same quarter in 2020.
"The median response time for these highest priority cases was 8.8 minutes, well within the 10-minute benchmark, the health department said.
"That the people of NSW continued to receive safe, high-quality care during this very challenging period is due to the outstanding efforts of our healthcare workers," NSW Health Executive Director of System Information and Analytics Branch Sharon Smith said.
"The impact of COVID-19 has unfortunately led to delays in some areas and we want to thank the community for their patience and understanding."
NSW Ambulance was meeting with the paramedics union at the Industrial Relations Commission on Monday in a bid to resolve the industrial dispute.
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