Spare a thought this summer for our critical frontline emergency servicepeople, who turn up whatever the weather, no matter the time of day or night, and regardless of the sticky or life-threatening situation we get ourselves in.
And at the same time flick them any spare change, too, because they need it as much as you may need someone to save your life. Let’s hope, though, the scenario staring you in the face is less acute than what our emergency services are being forced to deal with.
Our life-saving ambulance services would cease to exist without the overwhelmingly generous donations of ordinary mums and dads around the country. It has been designed that way since … forever. Government sources fund about 80% and the rest comes from donations.
The model has come in for some serious questioning in recent years. Now it is being called out by Dave Robinson, the CEO of the Wellington Free Ambulance Service, who says it’s past its use-by date and is such a drag on emergency response charities that people’s lives will soon be at risk if it continues.
Robinson is measured and until now has kept his frustrations to himself, but they’ve spilled into the public arena. Good on him; that’s leadership. His service has to raise $10 million a year from the community, every year, to stay the same as the year before. This allows for no expansion of the service.
He employs 450 staff, has up to 50 ambulances at his disposal, and more than 100 frontline staff, highly trained in acute emergency response, covering Wellington, Wairarapa and the Kāpiti Coast. They take 250,000 emergency calls a year and attend 54,000 events. There is never an off-day. They transported 44,000 patients across and around the region last year.
Some 13 years ago they took my Dad from his home to a hospice in the middle of the night because of the discomfort he was in from cancer. Sadly, it turned out to be his last ride; he died five days later. But crucially when Mum was stuffed and I was not at the house, they were there when Dad needed to hitch a ride to heaven, and I say thank-you for that.
What is making life even tougher is that Robinson’s best and most qualified paramedics are easily lured by better money across the ditch. The staff turnover rate is too high at 13% and we pay those highly trained professionals much less than their true worth.
The top rate, after years of experience and specialist training, is around $130k, so for someone with those specialist skills, Australia doesn’t have to try hard to beat that. Add in relocation allowances and a warmer climate and you can see the attraction. Easy pickings, we get Australia’s 501s, they get our underpaid clinicians.
It makes no sense to me. Why would we train these people for such highly specialised medical roles only to act so benignly when they leave? Surely, if we train them and pay them their worth, we will avoid making the same mistake over and over, spending huge money to repeat it.
Robinson is not known for saying things lightly or flippantly. He’s doing it to get a debate going before someone dies waiting for one of his ambulances. He’s keen to avoid that, as you can imagine.
In many ways, Robinson is a reluctant whistleblower. He says communities are cash-strapped and fatigued by charity requests - first Covid, then Ukraine and now Gaza. We’re not human Eftpos machines.
Handing around the bucket is an archaic, time-wasting nod to an agreement from another era. An ambulance costs $350,000. I hosted a Hato Hone St John Ambulance fundraiser years ago that basically saw us fill a pub in Auckland’s Mt Wellington. Half the crowd got boozed in the name of a quiz and raising money for a service that cleans up after drunk drivers have killed people on the roads.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the desperate irony of it all. So, let’s allow ambulance organisations to save lives rather than worry about being world-class fundraisers. Our government has to get much closer to this funding debate and start loosening the purse strings. This is what we expect our tax dollars to pay for and I am quite happy to forgo a tax cut in exchange for a sustainable, fully funded service.
It’s the folly of tax cuts when the truth is we need to fund the critical stuff first before putting money into the pockets of the well-heeled.
You’ll hear plenty of waffle from politicians, dancing all over the tiles trying to sidestep the inevitable, which is, it’s well past time for taxpayers, through the government, to take full responsibility for funding our ambulance services. Anything less puts lives at risk. When people like Robinson speak up, it might pay to listen and act. We can’t wait any longer to make some good decisions here. Let’s act now.
