Dear members,
The AEAWA have been supplied with an email communication issued from St John Senior Management. This email outlines the organisation’s current inability to fill a number of HLM vacancies, either through recruitment, through HLM overtime or through AM overtime. Further, due to the commitments made to WA Health in relation to this HLM role, the organisation will now remove on-road Area Managers in order to fill HLM these vacancies and ‘manage the ramp’.
The email continues to outline a number of impacts this move will have, including:
– Reduction in ability to provide Lucas support
– Reduction in ability to provide Elk lifting support
– Delays in mobilising to Code Blacks
– Delays with Wellbeing & Support follow up
– Reduction in roster management
– Delays in processing Incident Reports.
The AEAWA executive believe that the withdrawal of yet more on-road resources at a time when the service is crippled by inadequate resourcing, appalling response times and ramping, will simply make this situation worse. The removal of on-road management places our membership at increased risk, and further reduces the support available to our members.
The AEAWA believe this current crisis of resourcing and poor response times is the culmination of an outright failure to tackle ramping, a failure to ensure appropriate recruitment planning, a failure to develop new infrastructure across metropolitan Perth, and a failure to ensure adequate standby capacity.
The 2009 St John Ambulance Inquiry recommended standby capacity be 52.5%. On some recent days the service has seen the standby capacity sit at somewhere around 22% over 24 hours, dropping to between 0% – 5% during the day. The response of the organisation to this crisis has simply been to ‘manage the ramp’ and attempt to extract ever more productivity from an already exhausted and demoralised workforce, and in doing so increase their exposure to clinical risk. In addition to the current stress on road, officers now may not have a Lucas backup, may not have manager support for Code Blacks, may not have Wellbeing and Support follow-up, may not have roster requests actioned, and may not have their Incident Reports investigated in a timely manner. We will of course be raising these concerns with senior management.
Should any of our members be affected by these latest developments please contact a delegate.
Kind regards AEAWA Committee