Medical assistants to help paramedics

A single-crew ambulance will have some relief with an extra pair of hands, but the support will not be from a qualified paramedic.

Instead, emergency medical assistants will help many St John paramedics who attend critical incidents on their own.

About $59.2 million will be pumped into the service over four years to ensure all emergency road ambulance callouts are doublecrewed by 2021, Health Minister Jonathan Coleman announced yesterday.

The pre-budget announcement sees funding for 375 ’’new emergency medical and paramedic roles’’ to augment ambulances that are currently only staffed by one.

Emergency road ambulance callouts are almost entirely double-crewed in the Wellington region. For the rest of the country, last year nearly 38,500 of the 393,000 call outs were singlecrewed – about 10 per cent.

At a press conference at the St John National Headquarters in Auckland, Coleman said single crews would be eliminated and there would be a ‘‘mix’’ of qualified medics for each crew.

‘‘It’s like the emergency room, you get a range of people in the team. So there’ll be a paramedic on the crew but there’s also this position of emergency medical assistant [EMA] and some of those people will be part of the mix.’’

A 2008 select committee inquiry into ambulance services recommended two medically qualified ambulance officers in every ambulance.

St John chief executive Peter Bradley welcomed the announcement, saying the end of single crewing was one of the most significant developments in the history of St John service.

‘‘This is what we asked for . . . the whole recommendations have been implemented fully and we’re absolutely over the moon.’’

The package also introduced a new model to increase St John’s baseline funding and meet growing demand for ambulance services while addressing historic shortfalls.

The ambulance services are funded through Vote Health and ACC.