St John is staring at a post-lockdown financial hole and is restructuring to cut $30million in costs.
Pauline Latta knows too well the life or death nature of the ambulance service’s work.
Her children had been in ambulances several times, due to broken bones and serious allergic reactions.
"Without an ambulance
turning up it could have been a really different outcome," she said.
Her experience was one of the factors that prompted her to start a petition on change.org that asks the Government to fully fund the service.
As of yesterday afternoon, 13,002 people had added their signatures.
She said the thousands of signatures in just three days showed the public was behind the move.
"From a lot of the comment coming through it just seems like a no-brainer. There’s a lot of shock, I guess, that this hasn’t already happened."
She hoped the petition would attract at least 100,000 signatures.
St John Coastal Otago territory manager Doug Third said his team had already signed the petition and were sharing it as widely as they could.
"It is fantastic and humbling to see a member of the public so passionate and caring that they are also taking up the cause to help us; we are right behind any public support we can get to fully fund the emergency ambulance service.”
In late June, St John chief executive Peter Bradley said about 100 jobs were expected to go, although cuts to frontline staff would be minimised.
Ms Latta said she hoped to deliver the petition to the Government in Wellington.
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NZ does have a "fully funded service at the moment with highly trained, professional staff both paid ( lowest paid , as over supply of newly qualified people) and volunteers. St John receives funding from a number of sources for 'the provision of the treatment and transportation of the sick or injured to a place of care'. ACC, MoH, DHB's all contract St John and pay accordingly. A part charge is made to medical calls only . The Ambulance service rents all assets, funds raised for and owned by the local area. (Ownership model changed to enable rent to be charged?) . Take a moment to work through that. St John 'tenders' for the contracts that the DHB's, MoH and ACC put out. Yes, another organisation can tender if they wish or have the resources. Questions that need to be asked is why St John cannot provide services they priced and tendered for?
The model of delivery also needs to be questioned. e.g why multiple vehicles are sent to an incident when only one may be required. Research doesn't show an improvement in patient outcomes, but does delay responding to others in need.
Understand the real issues before calling for 'More funds' to fix a problem that may not exists .
Good On them, it should be 100% funded by the Government, however listening to talkback radio Over the years reading other posts on this, I suspect that there will be a few cat cats in St Johns that will not be pleased with this, I recall I heard that St Johns has a lot of investments and pots of gold that are covertly out of sight so they don't look so healthy in the eyes of the public.