In the early hours of 27 June, an ambulance officer nodded off at the wheel, just 400 metres from his home in northern Victoria. The ambulance he was driving smashed into a ditch and flipped over to its side. It was 1.15am, 18.5 hours after he had started his shift, at 7am the day before. He had been about to end his when he was dispatched to a job 50km away in NSW, even though he told the duty manager he had already completed 14.5 hours.
Jim Avard, who has been an ambulance officer for 23 years, felt he had no option but to go to the job. Luckily, he had already dropped his colleague off when he crashed. Mr Avard was not killed nor seriously hurt physically: but the incident haunts him.
Paramedics are furious; such long shifts with hours of involuntary overtime leave them dangerously fatigued. Initially Ambulance Victoria issued a statement claiming Mr Avard “was not working an 18.5-hour shift as alleged”, but later apologised and clarified that he had not be rostered to work 18.5 hours.
Union sources say the crash, and what they felt was a lack of support for the veteran officer, triggered members to pass a vote of no-confidence in Ambulance Victoria’s executive. The motion comes during a prolonged industrial dispute over pay and working conditions, extended waiting times at hospitals, a dispatch system that paramedics claim incorrectly classifies minor incidents as code-one “lights and sirens” emergencies, and ongoing internal conflict.
Last month Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas told reporters she was concerned about the excessive overtime paramedics are working and said the pay dispute had dragged on for far too long.
Source: The Age Ambulance Victoria: How Jim Avard’s crash became lightning rod in paramedics’ industrial dispute Read more on Fatigue and Shift Work