According to a paramedic working in Hull for Yorkshire Ambulance Service, staff are stretched to the limit, often working 12 hour shifts and sometimes up to 13 or 14 hours, without a meal break.

He claimed over Christmas 26 shifts hadn’t been covered because of sickness and crews were being delayed for up to an hour at the hospital because of a lack of beds.

Unison regional organiser Ray Gray said there were close to 100 vacancies going unfilled in Yorkshire: “Some of it is cost efficiencies and when they get a vacancy it takes nearly a year to get a qualified paramedic up and trained.

“For health and safety reasons unions have never agreed with a 12-hour shift, if they get a call at the end of the shift to the far end of the patch that could be another half an hour.

via Yorkshire Post.

Remember what he said after the election? The NHS is safe with the coalition. Spending on the NHS would be ‘ring fenced’.

True, he said that the NHS would be cut by £20 billion in four years, but these cuts wouldn’t affect front line staff or services to patients. Was he telling the truth?

There is nowhere more front line in health care than the Ambulance Service, and the London Ambulance Service, the largest in the world, has now found out whether these promises are to be kept.

In the next five years £53 million is to be taken out of a budget of £262 million. – In the next year this means 162 jobs to go, 130 of which are what Cameron would call ‘front line’ – Over the next five years a massive 890 jobs will be lost, 560 of which will be road crews, as front line as they come. – So between now and 2015 the LAS will lose nearly one-in-five of the staff who care directly for Londoners UNISON, the ambulance workers Union, is warning Londoners about this appalling situation.

Regional Organiser Phil Thompson said, “This is being forced on the Service by the government. These cuts are so deep they may not heal. If allowed to be carried out they will put at risk the many Londoners who rely on the LAS every day. With demand escalating & nearly 1,000 fewer staff no-one can now be sure of a safe service.”

London Ambulance worker Eric Roberts, UNISON Branch Secretary, said, “I am shocked by the size of these cuts. This is a cull of highly trained staff. It is disgusting, morally wrong & unacceptable. Have they forgotten the Olympics? How will we cope with the biggest sporting event in the world with hundreds fewer skilled staff? All staff are front line; without the crucial back-up services we cannot save lives. So much for Cameron’s promises.”

UNISON will not let our precious ambulance service be hacked to pieces. Londoners must join us in the fight to save our service.

Phil Thompson can be contacted on 0796 108 8164  p.thompson@unison.co.uk

Eric Roberts can be contacted on 0788 181 0430  Eric.Roberts@lond-amb.nhs.uk

Notes to editors

• Every year the London Ambulance Service receives over 1.5 million emergency calls and responds to over one million incidents.

• Last year, we responded to more than 43,500 incidents than the year before. This equates to an increase of demand of 4.5 per cent.

• Our budget is £281m.

• Our funding establishment is 4913 staff of which 3433 provide direct patient care.

• The 890 posts reductions include 162 posts for 2010/11

via LONDON AMBULANCE SERVICE AT RISK.

Although management and unions have now agreed to work more closely together, the Unison union says not much has changed since its branch committee wrote a damning letter to the chief executive earlier this year.

The letter said that the situation “is spiralling out of control” and that there is “a disturbing level of disharmony amongst staff and all levels of management”.

It says that the national response time targets are causing “intolerable pressure”, causing “patient care to become secondary”, and that meeting targets is “more important than staff welfare”.

Read full article: Lowestoft Journal.

Figures obtained by The Argus show the pressures and risks regularly faced by paramedics in Sussex.

The Freedom of Information figures revealed 40 reported cases of physical assaults across the county between April 2008 and March this year.

Read full article:  The Argus

UNISON SECAmb are appalled at the apparent lack of progresson the issue of “vehicle communication” for front healthandsafetyline staff.

It was UNISON staff side that formally raised this subject at the July 08 Central H/S Meeting the following meeting we looked at the comprehensive risk assessment and where assured that action to provide the essential equipment would be provided!

To date I believe there are still crews without the essential mobile/radios putting them selves at risk on a daily basis. This is totally unacceptable Therefore if no positive action is taken by the trust within 7 working days unison will take action against the employer with in a range of sanctions including reporting the trust to the H.S.E.under Health and Safety legislation.

Read full article:UNISON SECAmb

The ruling came after the House of Lords requested clarification over the case of five Her Majesty Revenue and Customs workers’ rights to long-term sick leave. This reverses the Court of Appeal’s ruling four years ago that found workers ineligible to claim holiday pay.

The CBI responded describing the ruling “a real blow to firms trying to keep jobs alive during the recession”. Katja Hall, CBI’s director of HR policy went on to say:”Businesses also suffer when staff take sick leave, and we had hoped that a compromise could have been achieved over unused holiday time”.

“Instead, at a time when the economy is struggling, this judgment will ensure that staff are away from the workplace for longer, and it will create a headache for HR departments, who will have to review their policies and contracts.”

Mark Mansell, head of employment at City law firm, Alien & Overy, advised companies that the ruling could prove costly for employers who have a “backlog of accrued holiday entitlement” from employees returning to work.

Some 2.6million people in the UK are claiming incapacity benefits. Sick leave is estimated to cost the economy £100billion a year.

From: UNISON-SECAmb

UNISON's SECAmb Website

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