Ambulance staff work 20,000 hours overtime

Ambulance staff in Enniskillen have worked almost 20,000 hours overtime in the last 12 months.
The figures, obtained by The Impartial Reporter, demonstrate the heavy workload and pressure that staff, including paramedics and ambulance drivers, are under in Fermanagh every day. 
Following a Freedom of Information request this newspaper can reveal that ambulance staff have attended almost 6,000 incidents in the county in the last year, including 146 incidents of psychological, abnormal behaviour and suicide, 606 falls and 140 incidents of overdose or poisoning. 
Other call outs include: 88 times for assault or sexual assault, 184 times for stroke, 161 times for traffic or transportation incidents, 74 times for cardiac, respiratory arrest or death, 455 times for chest pain and 18 times for pregnancy, childbirth or miscarriage.
Ambulance staff have also been called out 32 times for patients reporting headaches, five times for animal bites or attacks and 45 times for complaints of back pain during the last year.
A second Freedom of Information request has revealed that 19,780 hours of paid overtime has been clocked up by staff in Enniskillen in the last 12 months amounting to £249,329 in payments. 
A spokesperson for the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service has told this newspaper that the overtime hours paid estimation is based on overtime cost of payments to staff who work from the Enniskillen Station divided by weighted mean hourly rate, calculated by month and grade.
“This information is based on the months that overtime is claimed rather than accrued and for Enniskillen based staff, however, these staff may have been working out of other stations than Enniskillen to provide cover.”
Donal O’Cofaigh, the secretary of Fermanagh Council of Trade Unions, said the statistics highlight the service provided to the community by ambulance staff and paramedics “as well as the pressures that they face on a day and daily basis.”
“Staff and the service are dealing with increasing demand year on year which stretches resources and personnel both in the vehicles and in the control room. This is happening in the context of tight budgets with fewer staff expected to cover more of a workload. The scale of overtime figures in the service demonstrates that the service is caught between rising demand and fixed budgets.
“Working in emergency services is stressful at any time but the pressures on ambulance staff are reaching dangerously high levels. A survey of paramedics conducted last year found 71 per cent suffered from sleep problems and 64 per cent suffered from anxiety. At the same time, workers across the healthcare sector have watched their wages fall significantly behind inflation since the recession ten years ago meaning that they have suffered a 15 per cent decline in their standard of living,” he said.
Mr. O’Cofaigh said the pressures caused by funding cuts is having a huge impact on staff and on patient safety “while the lack of management support leaves staff to deal with unacceptably high stress levels.”