*888*Access Denied*888*

I was talking today to one of the Bundeena Ambo's about the situation regarding access to Ambulance Services here. Basically the below-mentioned Officers have been volunteering their time, but without much support at all from the NSW Ambulance Service.

As we already know, Ambo's are over-worked and underpaid like other healthcare workers, but in this case the officers were on Stand-by outside their normal rosters and thus suffered extreme fatigue.

It seems to me that the solution is so simple. Surely it is possible to build a 'Bundeena Stand-by' into the rosters of these three officers. This practice might even get adopted by other 'remote' suburbs!

I really think it's ridiculous for a suburb with the same postcode as Cronulla to have such limited access to basic services. You would think we live out in Woop-Woop.


This whole story certainly doesn't follow our Principles of SAFETY, ACCESS and INCLUSION!

I've copied an article that appeared in the local Leader 10th July 2008


FOR the past 15 years, residents of Bundeena and Maianbar, on the edge of the Royal National Park, relied on local ambulance officers to be on call between shifts and on their days off as the only emergency medical service in the immediate area.

Other than three local ambulance officers, residents have just one part-time GP and no after-hours emergency service. There is no local taxi service and the ferry stops at 7pm.

Danelle Brown, of Maianbar, said she had to wait for between 35 and 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive from Engadine in January last year after her three-year-old daughter, Esprit, collapsed and stopped breathing.

She stopped breathing again in December. This time a local ambulance arrived within 25 minutes, she said.

"If they [ambulance officers] were at a station, it would have been 10 minutes. I think if there was a service in town it would probably be used more.

"I think people realise the waiting time and they panic and jump in the car and deal with their problems themselves and go to Sutherland Hospital," Mrs Brown said.

One local ambulance officer is due to retire in two years, one has a wife who is terminally ill, and the other has three children under 10. They are fed up working up to 20 hours straight and decided in May to withdraw their on-call services due to extreme fatigue and a lack of support from ambulance management, a submission to the parliamentary inquiry into the Ambulance Service of NSW says.

The submission says the Bundeena ambulance is stationed at Engadine, under an ambulance service directive issued in May. It could therefore "easily be more than an hour" to get a person to a hospital, "posing serious risk to emergency patients", the submission says.

Last year, the three local officers - who each work at different stations outside the park - responded to 190 calls in addition to their normal shifts and overtime, the submission says. They were unable to respond to 20 calls.

The submission says the final straw was when two officers were "reprimanded and dictated to" after telling management they were too exhausted from having worked 20 hours straight to start another 14-hour shift in a few hours.

An ambulance service spokesman said the number of call-outs was not high enough to justify a full-time local service, which the Bundeena/Maianbar Ambulance Action Group wants.

The ambulance service has proposed that a scheme in which NSW Fire Brigades' officers act as "first responders".

The fire brigade supports the idea because its officers are trained in advanced first aid and can provide basic life support, a spokeswoman said.

The action group said in its submission to the inquiry that the proposal was unacceptable because the Bundeena-Maianbar area was too far from a hospital and fire brigade officers were not able to make medical diagnoses or administer drugs.


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