Assaults on ambulance officers on rise

FED UP: St John Lakes area acting territory manager Liesa Tocknell just wants to help those in need. PHOTO/ANDREW WARNER

A Rotorua ambulance officer says he is concerned for his and his colleagues' safety as the number of abusive incidents against ambulance staff rises.

In the past year St John's front line ambulance officers have been physically and verbally abused nearly 3000 times.

Bay of Plenty officers have been assaulted 227 times in the past nine months. Of these, 162 were verbal assaults while 65 were physical.

The abuse included being spat on, aggressive behaviour - sometimes with a weapon, threats of violence, physical assaults including kicks, bites and punches.

St John Ambulance Lakes area acting territory manager Liesa Tocknell said, in Rotorua, officers had seen an increase in both physical and verbal assaults this year.

"It's not on. I have 20 years' experience and 20 years ago people respected the uniform. I don't know what's changed."

She said about 50 per cent of the assault cases in Rotorua involved drugs and alcohol.

"They threaten us with anything from punching us to wanting to kill us.

"We walk into some really high emotion situations. Every abuse case is different. Sometimes the scenes are out of control.

"Honestly, we just want to do our job," she said.

A third of the nationwide cases involved physical aggression and violence, with up to 10 incidents a month being serious enough for ambulance officers to need hospitalisation and ongoing treatment.

St John launched a campaign earlier this month called 'Hands Off' with the message 'abuse and assaults on ambulance officers will not be tolerated and prosecutions will be sought'.

A Rotorua St John ambulance officer, who wished to remain anonymous for safety reasons, said he had been assaulted on the job and female officers had also been attacked.

He said a lot of the time it wasn't the patients that became abusive, but their friends or bystanders.

"Often it's older men in their 40s who should know better. Alcohol is a massive factor."

He said, because they didn't have enough funding, women officers sometimes had to attend jobs alone which was something the team found unsettling.

"Us guys often swing by when we can just to make sure everything is okay.

"We love our job and we go out there to do the best for our patients and we all have families who we want to go home to at the end of our shift. At times it can be a scary job," he said.