The NHS paramedic: you pretend to focus on patient welfare, yet make cuts that leave the community with a second-class service

You harass my team constantly while we’re trying to do our job. When I am with a patient, non-clinical staff call me every half hour asking for updates – and apply pressure for the crew to move on to other 999 calls.

What you say on the phone is overheard by patients, often the elderly and vulnerable, which makes them feel guilty about having an ambulance – and at times patients refuse to go to hospital even though they should, so the ambulance can be available for someone else.

You want us to work quicker and quicker, yet this means reporting accidents and safeguarding vulnerable patients can be missed. There’s never time – as the shifts often over-run and the exhausted crews go home without completing the necessary paperwork. Ambulances are also often denied the opportunity to restock drugs, potentially leaving other patients without the care they need.

There are no government targets for this though, so under your leadership the staff, who are caring by nature, become increasingly disillusioned and frustrated – up to the point they need to leave the profession for their own sanity.

The bullying doesn’t end there. There are staff employed by the NHS to pressurise crews at hospital to turn calls around quicker, whether they are in a position to do so or not – yet again chasing a government target.

You revel in having good figures and use all the tactics you can to get them. You chase any government or Department of Health targets, such as sickness rates and flu vaccination rates. You pressurise your management team to harass staff to have the influenza vaccination against their wishes, and instruct managers to sack people on long-term sick leave. This leads to dread, fear, and plummeting moral.

Recruitment and retention of paramedics is a constant, national problem. Pay is being reviewed at a national level, but it’s not just about pay: your management is part of the problem, which is not being addressed. The number of people currently leaving the profession shows this. No amount of money can persuade people to continue to be on the receiving end of unattainable targets and bullying.

There is a cumulative effect: you bully your directors, they bully the more junior managers, who bully the staff. So experienced paramedics leave and take years of practical knowledge and experience with them, to be replaced with inexperienced new staff on significantly less pay.

You pretend in public to focus on patient care and welfare, but then make cuts that leave parts of the community with a second-class service. Bigger is not necessarily better. When the government merged ambulance services, from county services to regional ones, standards went down the pan.

Money is the true deciding factor here, not best practice, so the best care won’t be rolled out on a regional basis. Is it any wonder so many people are leaving, to be replaced by less experienced but, most of all, cheaper, staff?