HSE Urged To Reverse Clare Paramedic Daytime Hours Plan

0:00Well, this is for the new development of the Community Paramedic, which is a new initiative in the ambulance service in the last four years, a service where the ambulance management and personnel have recognized that a lot of the calls that the service do not necessarily require having to be transported to hospital and it's about trying to find other pathways or avenues where low-acuity ailments and issues that people have are minor injuries can be treated in other avenues other than going to the main emergency department of the local hospitals. So it's about trying to get Paramedics trained up to a master's level. There will be people who run the road with about eight years of service and then available to train up and so there are a lot of clinical skills and experience behind them and then they go and they do this master's training to become Community Paramedics and I suppose those who have

1:04been previously qualified there's only about 30 of them so far in the country because it's a new initiative and have had the availability to be able to work some sort of shift pattern and either working up to midnight are some of them true the night at first small number of nights in the month and it offers just I suppose a different way of doing things for low-acuity stuff. The recent cohort who've been trained understood and were signed up to train under the same terms and conditions would have now been told that they would be a daytime only service so I suppose that means that people are upscaling, getting further training, taking on extra responsibilities both as a result of dropping their shift allowance will mean that they're working far less money than they would with with the lesser skills or training and where they would be just transporting to hospital rather than making some other decisions on pathways for patients to be

2:07get access to medical care. And I'd imagine outside of look the obvious financial implications that you can't do more than just your data and hours it probably won't help I mean you'll probably find this as a struggle in the ambulance service as well that you might not have that extra help in the evening to deal with a lower acuity call. Yeah and that's what people would have been signing up to help with in that look we all recognize that hospitals nationwide are very busy not to mind our own hospital in Nimric in the Midwest and things get busier throughout the day so like at that time from four o'clock to ten o'clock at night is definitely a very busy time for the ambulance service where calls have built up the hospital is getting busy with the build-up of patients throughout the day and there are some issues that can be dealt with safely at home or through other pathways and everybody wants to be able to help to try and alleviate that or to find other solutions to this current situation and I suppose this community paramedic scheme was

3:11deemed to be very successful where it had been piloted and the HSE and the ambulance service are keen to roll it out but as we know recently from I suppose the ambulance service dispute like that pay and retention were big issues it so we can't have where people are asked to take on more skills and be promoted would have less pig when they do that and coming from the ambulance service you're used to the 24-7 you're used to odd hours on social hours night time hours and we see the demand for the calls in those times and would be and everybody's willing to work to try and alleviate that problem and I suppose if you can find new developments to just day time hours well that's only going to increase the problems in the early evening and late evening and into the night and look politician Tarena involves and they say you hope that the national ambulance service at the HSE or to average making this call will roll back.

4:13Absolutely look there's there's precedence there for people who are already working in the role and there's 10 new people qualified ready to roll out nationwide in different parts of the country and all those regions would have been you know of the understanding that this was going to be a late evening and provide service in daytime and late evening and in some instances throughout the night where local rosters or local need would be seen to do so so like if local need needs that then it shouldn't be prevented from providing the service in the regions.