Facing threats while saving lives all comes with territory

THE threat of violence is ever present. As constant as the red dirt and searing heat.

It stalks the men and women of the St John’s Critical Response Unit in a place where many patients, or their families and friends, are affected by alcohol and drugs. Often both. They have been punched, kicked and dragged out of their ambulances but it doesn’t deter the compassionate paramedics of The Alice.

“If there’s drink, that changes the behaviour towards us so to go into a place where you have hostility and you are confined within four walls while providing treatment with limited exits … is difficult, dangerous and should be avoided without police escort,” Paul Reeves says.

But it’s not the only danger. Alice Springs is surrounded by four searing deserts – they are hot, dry, isolated, perpetually unforgiving and deadly.

They each present an exceptional set of challenges few first responders face anywhere else in the world.

Paul is the only qualified intensive care paramedic in Alice Springs, with a population of 29,000. He is training and mentoring his younger colleague, Caitlin Little.

Caitlin, 28, has been seriously assaulted three times since she started work in the town four years ago.

The first time, she was punched by a drunk man while on the ground trying to resuscitate his father.

“Those ones are frustrating because now you’ve assaulted the emergency workers and now we have to retreat,” she says.

“Now there’s nothing more you can do for this man, who’s not breathing and now he is dead. Whether or not he would have died without input I’m not sure, but that was hard.”

The second time, on New Year’s Eve in 2015, was horrific.

It was the early hours of the morning and her crew had been dispatched to a routine job for a woman with breathing difficulties.

Caitlin was working with a new graduate, Emily.

They treated the female patient in the ambulance before agreeing for her to go back inside to get her house keys. Moments later she ran out screaming that her partner was going to kill her.

“She jumped into the back of the ambulance,” Caitlin recalls. “I was trying to reach over to put the seatbelt on the patient because I knew we were about to accelerate out.

“We were about to speed out of there when he reached open the door and grabbed me and pulled me out.”

“I was thrown on to the ground, up against the ambulance and then into the ambulance,” Caitlin continues.

The man chased Caitlin and Emily through a town camp until police arrived.

The St John’s annual report in 2016-17 revealed one in six Territorians used ambulances, the triple-0 line received 51,970 calls, and paramedics attended 52,581 cases.