An interview with St John
Kia ora. We’re both 11 years old and we love to do gymnastics. We are in Year 6 at Waihī Beach Primary School. We chose to interview Lisa from St John, as we wanted to know more about how St John helps the community.
How does St John help the community?
St John helps in a number of ways. We obviously go and help people if they are in distress or if they are unwell or had a crash or if they have fallen over. Also through that door behind us, there is the health shuttle. We have volunteers that come in and they take people to appointments that can’t normally get there, they drive little mini buses or cars and they drive people there. It’s well-rounded how we help the community, we help in emergencies and in non-emergencies too.
How long have you been in your current role in St John?
Personally, I’ve only been here since August. I was living in Perth for ten years. I did my training in Perth. I became a paramedic in 2016. My daughter had a baby and she lives in Waihī Beach, so we came back because she had a baby.
I applied for St John over here and got a permanent position here in the Waihī station; it couldn’t have worked out better. I had to kind of retrain in a sense, I had three months where I had to relearn CPGs, get rid of my old clinical practice guidelines and bring in new and better clinical practice guidelines and then I sat a test at the end of October and passed that so I got my badges back. It’s been quite intense, to say the least.
Do you like your job and why?
I love my job! I love it even more now that I’m here. I was working in the city in Perth and that wears you down. Then I came here to the middle of nowhere, where you have to know what you are doing and you have to know how sick your patient is and it’s almost like an addiction to know more and you’ve got to know how to treat your patient.
I love the fact that I can go to work and I can either do something life-saving or I can hold somebody’s hand and make them feel better and that’s just the best feeling in the world to be able to go to work and that’s my job, to make a difference every day whether it’s resuscitating somebody or holding an old lady’s hand because she has fallen over and hurt her leg, you know she’s not going to die but old people are just like “oh I don’t want to be a burden” and that’s what I love about my job.
Can you tell us a little bit about your individual roles?
There are different levels of ambulance officers. There are first responders, emergency medical assistants or EMA’s, emergency medical technicians or EMTs, and then paramedics which is what I am. ICPs are Intensive Care Paramedics and CCPs are Critical Care Paramedics. We all have different roles in the ambulance, ICPs and CCPs are generally the little cars that you see driving around. ICPs
and CCPs are on the helicopters. You must see heaps of helicopters coming out of Waihī Beach? We load the helicopter very often to Waihī Beach and Waihī. We all have different levels of knowledge and education and that’s pretty much the different levels.
When you’re in the ambulance, are you always working with someone else?
Up until recently, around this area, they were single-crewed. There was a big rally and financial input to make it all double crewed, which is one of the reasons I got my job because there were so many positions available. Now, yes we always run with at least two people. Sometimes it’s three if we have a volunteer or if we have someone from uni that needs to do practicum then there are three of us.
For me personally, as a paramedic, I run the truck, so I’m never working with another paramedic, I’m always working with someone in the level below me. I don’t like saying that, but they’re on a different level so they don’t have the same information I have, so I have to run the truck. Some people go job about because the driving out this way is long, you know you’re fifty minutes to Thames, fifty minutes to an hour to Tauranga, if you had to take a patient to Waikato which we do very often that’s an hour and a half, so there’s lots of driving. It’s really important to swap that driving over.
If you wanted to work for St John but you didn’t want to work in the ambulance, what other roles and opportunities are there?
We’ve got the first response unit, it’s a little jeep that you might see around (the yellow and green one), in the summer we were flat out. The first response unit is a volunteer situation, so on my days off if there’s a job that the units can’t get to straight away, I go straight to it and there’s other volunteers within the beach community that also help and that means that Waihī Beach is covered until we can get an ambulance there.
We’re really really lucky that St John provides that and it’s a super role and when you guys are old enough (if you want to be volunteering) that’s the kind of thing you can do to get involved and help the community cause it’s a real buzz to live in the community and actually go and help someone until an ambulance arrives.
The communication centre dispatch are actually the people that give us the jobs. You have a call taker, who takes the calls from the person who is ringing, which can be a very stressful job. People don’t think about these call takers, all the community sees are us out on the road. In fact, I’ve sat in communications when the call takers are taking a call. You have people ringing who are stressed, upset and crying. They have to try to make some kind of sense out of that call, to be able to give us some kind of information on what we’re going to. Then the call takers send that job to the dispatcher and the dispatcher gives it out to us, so there is that whole communications area.
We have management that looks after us on the road. You’ve got the health shuttle, those are volunteers. The helicopter is a little bit different, when you ring and ask for a helicopter you’re talking with St John people but the ICPs and the CCPs are the ones that man the helicopter, and actually run separately (they’re not employed by St John) but it’s certainly a role that a lot of people will want to get into because we use them all of the time. I feel like there’s a whole lot more.