‘It’s not just about pay but safety of patients’
AMBULANCE SERVICE PERSONNEL OUT ON THE PICKET LINES AGAIN
AMBULANCE staff taking part in the latest strike action say they are fighting for patients as much as themselves.
The GMB Union has urged the government back to the table to continue negotiations to increase its pay offer, as well as improving working conditions for staff and improving patients’ experiences.
East Midlands Ambulance Service staff were on strike for 24 hours until 7am on Tuesday, although still attending category one and two calls.
Picket lines were set up at ambulance stations at Gorse Hill, Goodwood, Narborough, Loughborough, Hinckley, and Oakham.
Liam Carlile, a technician, said: “We’re striking today due to a pay dispute and to change unsafe service for the public.
“More strikes poses a higher risk to the community but if nothing gets done to change how things are going, the public are going to be at risk anyway. This is what is needed to make a change.
We tried to get things sorted before it came to strike action, but nothing was done.”
The GMB said they wanted to stress the need for better funding across the NHS.
Helen Stokes, GMB rep at Narborough Ambulance Station, said: “The time-critical patients are being responded to, with most of our staff currently out on calls including to a suspected stroke victim.
“Even though we’re on strike, we’re not heartless.
“We will still respond to life or death calls and where we are needed the most. We want the issues resolved as quickly as possible so we can go back to the jobs we love doing. But it’s not just pay, it’s patient safety. We shouldn’t have to keep patients in the backs of ambulances for hours waiting for a bed.
“It’s the lack of available beds at the hospitals but also social care struggling to get elderly and at-risk people out of hospital that are too unsafe to go back to their homes. It keeps beds blocked. It’s change that’s needed across the NHS as a whole.
“Pay is obviously a factor, too. We’ve had a pay freeze for the past 10 years and while we were okay with it and understood things were tough, it’s starting to impact us and we are struggling to pay bills and being more and more out of pocket.
“That needs to change. The cost of living crisis is affecting us all. We just want to have the issues we have resolved so we can go back to work and enjoy what we’re doing.”
Ferdousara Uddin, GMB Union officer at the Gorse Hill picket line, said: “We are striking to get the government around the table to sit down and talk with us.
“It’s about pay, but it’s also 133,000 vacancies in the NHS, it’s about work conditions and pay being so bad the NHS can’t retain staff and people aren’t applying for jobs.
“Being thousands of staff members down would put a strain on any service, and the NHS is no different.
“We can’t even begin to look at an exit plan for the industrial action if we can’t get the government around the table, which it is refusing to do.”
Narendra Mistry, an emergency care assistant at the Goodwood picket line, said: “We’ve got people leaving left, right, and centre. We had 30 new paramedics join us a few years ago and now there’s only five left.
“We are on one of the lower pay bands in the NHS despite being the first to arrive at the scene.
“There are a lot of jobs in the NHS and in private health that trained paramedics can do with better pay and working conditions and all we are asking is for a fairer balance of pay and support while on the frontlines of the NHS.
“Patient safety is number one to us. We can’t deal with patients being kept in ambulances because there’s no beds.
“The government would rather NHS Trusts build sheds outside of A&E to store patients with private healthcare staff to wait for beds than invest the money in the hospitals and staff themselves.”
Paramedics start at Band 5 in the NHS pay scale, going into Band 6 after two years.
Band 5 starts at £25,655 and Band 6 stops at £39,027. The government’s current pay offer is a minimum of £1,400 a year extra per year, which would be the case for most of the Band 5 and Band 6.