Listening to Crawley’s paramedics

Anyone who has followed any news this week will know that today is the first day of strike action by ambulance workers in Crawley and across the country. While endless commentators have been going hard on the subject, unfortunately the voices of those actually on the frontline have been hard to find in the press. So, with a big South East Coast Ambulance Service presence on Manor Royal, I went to join one of the pickets and do what the Government has repeatedly failed to do: listen.

The first thing to say was that they were all in uniform and would be taking it in turns to respond to every call relating to a life-threatening injury or illness. No one chooses to become a paramedic because they want to put lives at risk and despite workers on strike not being paid, they were determined to do everything they could to preserve life.

Anyone who has been following changes to the UK’s healthcare model will know that the general direction of travel is reducing the number of locations where treatment is available and using the freed-up resources to develop remaining facilities as centres of excellence. There are big issues with how this has been delivered in practice, not least due to NHS underfunding, but on paper it makes sense. However, at its heart is an extremely high dependence upon ambulance services to get people to those centres of excellence in an emergency. That’s where the model begins to fall apart, because for decades now we have been struggling to recruit paramedics.

Pay isn’t the only issue, paramedics are facing growing threats to their personal safety with one of those I spoke with this morning having been threatened at knifepoint just two days before, but the reality is that the NHS is increasingly reliant upon a service stuck in a permanent recruitment crisis. After austerity and now rapid inflation, these problems are only getting worse and it’s not exaggerating to say that the future of the NHS is at stake on this issue, that’s why it has come to strike action.

The Government need to listen to the ambulance workers on this, the public already are. Of the dozens of vehicles which went past while I was at the picket, by far the majority honked to show their support. It’s not surprising when polls show that two-thirds of UK residents are on the side of the striking paramedics.

Ultimately, it’s our National Health Service which is on the line. Ambulance workers have the facts on their side, the moral argument on their side, and the public on their side, all we need now is to find someone in our Government prepared to do the right thing.