As 2023 progressed, St John entered the second year of its five-year Manaaki Ora strategy, which includes a commitment to achieving health equity for all.
A new clinical strategy was launched to lay a foundation to integrate better with the health system and explore new models of care to ensure the ambulance service is high quality, safe and well received by patients, as well as ensuring the appropriate clinical expertise and support is available to the entire organisation.
“We’ve remained firmly focused on building a stronger workforce by boosting the number of front-line staff, as well as filling vacancies.
“We’re pleased with our international recruitment efforts, having hired more than 100 experienced paramedics from Australia and the United Kingdom,” Mr Ohs said.
“We’re also proud to have delivered our very first recruitment hīkoi in Tairāwhiti and the Eastern Bay of Plenty aimed at improving our workforce so it better reflects the communities we serve.”
The success of St John’s Residential Emergency Medical Technician programme continued in 2023, with 290 new graduates working as ambulance officers around the motu since the launch of the initiative in 2021.
St John also bolstered its response capability for large scale emergencies and events by establishing additional major incident support teams (MIST), rolling out 16 new MIST vehicles and introducing two new command units.
Mr Ohs said St John continued to record an increase in demand for its ambulance services in 2023. Last year, emergency call handlers received nearly 690,000 111 calls for help — a 2.4 percent rise from 2022 (673,821).
While this increase was lower than the previous two years — when call volumes grew between 9-11 percent — last year’s figure is 24 percent higher than five years ago and 54 percent higher than a decade ago.
Winter ailments and Covid-19 contributed to a higher workload over the colder months. August was the busiest month for emergency call handlers and dispatchers who took 60,822 emergency calls for help. This was closely followed by December, — 60,488.
Mr Ohs said front-line ambulance staff were also kept busy, responding to 437,960 incidents across the motu — a 4.2 percent increase on 2022. The busiest locations were Christchurch, Auckland, Manawatū, Hamilton and the Western Bay of Plenty.
While the emergency ambulance service had seen steady growth in the number of patients with moderate, serious and critical injuries, there was a 16 percent decrease in the number of patients attended to by an ambulance crew with more minor conditions between 2020 and 2023.
That is largely due to the success of secondary triaging, where lower acuity patients are assessed by a clinician over the phone and provided more appropriate advice and care.
“The most common reasons for calling for an ambulance last year were consistent with previous years, Mr Ohs said. These included referrals from a health practitioner, breathing problems, chest pain, falls, and people unconscious or passing out.
There were some notable incidents.
“We recorded a 30.4 percent upsurge in industrial/machinery incidents and a 22.5 percent rise in calls for heat/cold exposure, potentially due to patients affected by extreme weather and flooding events.
“In addition, we saw a 15.7 percent increase in incidents involving hazardous materials such as carbon monoxide.”
Water-related incidents remain a concern for ambulance staff who responded to 482 drownings, near-drownings, and diving incidents last year — 11.1 percent higher than in 2022.
