AMBULANCE crews in south-east Wales are staging a four-week, unofficial overtime ban to highlight how much the ambulance service now relies on their willingness to work overtime because of the shortage of staff. Paramedics, who say they will work to contract until January 16, say they are worried that patient safety is being compromised.
Paramedics taking part in the overtime ban say some of their colleagues are doing more than 100 hours overtime a month – just to provide a basic service – and will be lucky to see their own families this Christmas.
The paramedics said the local community was being done an injustice by running down the ambulance service to dangerously low levels.
The staff shortage is right across the board, say those taking part in the overtime ban, from paramedics to control staff taking calls from the public – with the inevitable knock-on effect on ambulance response times.
The paramedics taking part in the unofficial action said there was little else they could do as individuals to highlight the shockingly inadequate level of service to the public.
‘Everybody in Wales is being affected by this,’ said one paramedic, who didn’t want to give his name.
These cuts come at the same time as the government has made its intentions clear regarding the future of District General Hospitals: it wants them to close.
This will see ambulance crews having to travel even longer distances to get patients to hospital. In addition, the government plans to introduce more ‘one-man ambulances’ operated by paramedics.
Yet those hospitals that remain open are already struggling to cope with the numbers of patients they are receiving, because the NHS has been run down for the last three decades.
Staff shortages are by no means confined to the ambulance service. On Wednesday, a National Audit Office report revealed that there was an acute shortage of neonatal nurses, putting the lives of new-born babies at risk.
Last Sunday, a queue of 10 ambulances formed outside Cardiff’s University Hospital of Wales as the overstretched A&E department struggled to cope with the numbers of patients it was receiving.
This is now taken to be a ‘normal’ occurrence in Wales.
In fact, so enthusiastic is the government and its ‘yes’ men on NHS Trust boards to make cuts that the NHS now has a £1.8 billion ‘surplus’. In other words, £1.8 billion has been cut over and above what the government has demanded.
However, that money is not going back to the NHS to reopen closed hospitals or recruit extra staff. That money is going back into the government’s coffers and will be used to boost the private sector.
The government’s strategy is to turn the NHS completely over to the private sector, so that the NHS becomes just a ‘logo’ or front for private companies.
Already, hospitals are being shut so that health authorities can pay their ‘debts’ to the privateers under the Private Finance Initiative.
In addition, the British Medical Association has protested that the government is ‘fixing the market’ by setting artificial targets for hospitals and GPs which skew health care and further favour the private sector.
In this situation it is an absolute disgrace that the ambulance workers are forced to take unofficial action to highlight the critical situation the NHS now faces.
Those trade union leaders who continue to refuse to take action to defend the NHS, not even organising an official overtime ban in support of the ambulancemen, must be sacked immediately.
The health service trade unions must go to the TUC and demand a general strike to defend the NHS.
The example set by the creation of the North-East London Council of Action to defend the NHS by all means necessary, including occupations, must be followed by building Councils of Action all over the country and the working class must form its own government, in order to stop the privatisation of the NHS and the destruction of the Welfare State, and to expand both, through the nationalisation of the banks and the drug companies.
