Welcome sight when you need emergency care

We see them in the street, sometimes with lights flashing and sirens blaring. We see them on television attending various disasters, and those who find themselves the first at the scene of a car accident are certainly glad to see them come around the corner. Debbie Porteous spent a few hours behind the scenes of Dunedin's St John ambulance service.

On Wednesday, three day-shift crews at St John ambulance service in Dunedin start work at 7am.

By morning-tea time, they already had been to Palmerston to bring to Dunedin Hospital a man who injured himself falling from the steps of an Intercity bus; travelled to Sawyers Bay to deal with a man experiencing chest pain; and driven to Brockville, where someone had collapsed.

Before lunch, an elderly woman had fallen in Stuart St and a man had fainted in a South Dunedin bank. Ambulances had been called to both.

By the end of the day, three double-crewed ambulances in Dunedin and one in Mosgiel had been called to 25 jobs.

And today was quiet, said team manager Gavin Weastell.

Even so, we had to leave our lunch on the table when a 91-year-old Roslyn woman experiencing chest pain pressed her life-link alarm.

A cold piece of sweet-and-sour pork can make you appreciate the many small inconveniences emergency service workers put up with as they help people with every-day personal crises.

But paramedic Daniel Rooney said having your meal interrupted for the fourth time, or not getting home until hours after a 12-hour shift was supposed to end, was not unusual.

"It bothers you at first, but you soon get used to it."

Each ambulance in Dunedin averages about six or seven jobs a day, Mr Weastell says, but it was not unusual for some to attend 10 jobs - each taking an average of an hour.

It worked out to more than 200 jobs a week.

Mr Weastell joined St John as a cadet when he was 11. He volunteered on ambulances as soon as he could and had been employed by St John for more than 30 years.

Now, he managed a team of 30 paid ambulance staff in Dunedin and Mosgiel and about 30 volunteers. More volunteers were available for first-aid/emergency care for events.

The types of jobs ambulances were called out to had changed over the years, Mr Weastell said.

Most noticeably, better-built vehicles had resulted in a massive drop in mid-range injuries from car crashes.

Also, people were living longer - more than half of all jobs ambulances were called to these days were medical. Strokes were common, as were fainting and falls.

The life of an ambulance officer could be routine, but at other times it could be challenging, demanding and rewarding, said Mr Rooney.

"You don't know what you are going to do, where you are going to go, what environment you are going to be in, or who you are going to meet. It's fantastic."

But even the wealth of experience could not prepare ambulance staff for what they might be faced with on any given day, said advanced paramedic Andrew McLellan.

After 25 years, he still enjoyed the unpredictability of the job.

"The day you think you've seen it all, is the day you will get something you just have no idea how to deal with."

It was a personally rewarding job, the attraction of which was the challenge of sorting out somebody else's crisis, he said.

"You have to be a multiple-personality to do this job really. Some days you have to be a counsellor, others a teacher. Some days you have to be assertive and others appeasing."

Learning and constantly honing the medical skills required for crisis intervention were aspects of the job.

"If somebody who is seriously ill is in a house that's got 10 flights of steps and is on the side of a hill, as so many places in Dunedin are, you think 'how are we going to get them out of here?' It takes some fairly creative thinking sometimes."

While everyone knew what a police officer or a firefighter did, it was not usually until people needed to call for an ambulance that they found out what ambulance staff did, Mr McLellan said.

He felt St John was often the "forgotten face of an emergency" because they had already left most incidents before media got there and often the people who used the service did not wake up until ambulance staff were long gone.

While needing an ambulance one day might be something most people had thought about, but not closely considered, keeping a fully-equipped ambulance service on the road 24 hours a day was an expensive business for a charity, said Mr Weastell.

The defibrillators St John used cost $40,000 each. There were 57 ambulances in Otago and Southland, each costing up to $200,000 equipped, reckoned fleet manager Neil Monk.

For every shift of ambulance staff, there were also rescue helicopter staff, patient transfer staff, mechanics, first-aid teachers, life-link staff and administrators to pay.

And then there were those who do not get paid.

One volunteer, a mental health worker who did not want to be named, said she worked one 12-hour shift a fortnight because it was personally rewarding and allowed her to practise health work in a different context.

"You're doing something you've trained for, you get to help people and make a huge difference in someone's life, and sometimes save a life, which is pretty cool."

• It is St John's annual appeal week.

 

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ST JOHN IN NEW ZEALAND

• 1885 The year St John began in Christchurch
• 350,000 patients treated and transported a year
• 295,000 emergency incidents attended a year
• 16 million ambulance-kilometres a year
• 600 ambulances
• 40 emergency helicopters available for St John dispatch
• 8700 public events a year for which St John provides first aid and emergency care
• 189 ambulance stations
• 60,000 people trained in first aid by St John each year
• 2200 paid staff (2008)
• 7800 volunteers (2008)
• 5500 members of St John youth programme (2008)
• 4 skill levels of ambulance staff - ambulance officer, paramedic, upskilled paramedic and advanced paramedic (skill levels also apply to volunteers)

SOURCE: ST JOHN

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