NIAS propose 'most radical changes to ambulance provision in 20 years.'
The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service has said the most radical changes to ambulance provision in 20 years is needed, as it launches a public consultation.
The consultation has been commissioned as part of the HSC Transformation Programme set out in the “Health and Wellbeing 2026: Delivering Together” strategy.
The past five years has seen the number of calls to NIAS rise by about 50%, to a figure of around 250,000 last year.
The demand for those services currently vastly outstrips the ability to meet them, with the eight-minute waiting target for an urgent ambulance consistently missed across Northern Ireland.
Therefore, the Ambulance Service is proposing a switch to a call-handling system like the one used in the rest of the UK.
Operations Manager Brian McNeill said it is about targeting what they do more effectively.
"About 30% of our 999 calls are currently being classed as life-threatening," he said.
"We have clinical evidence to suggest that it's not 30%, it should be seven percent.
"The targets we currently worked to were invented, that's the best word, around 40 years ago.
"They were based on survival of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
"Other than for cardiac arrest, there's no clinical evidence to suggest the current targets are worth keeping.
"We have a system in England that has been clinically trialled since 2015, with 14 million calls going through it and no adverse incidents reported."
The changes suggested would require an investment of around £30m, which is a sizeable sum given the current budget stands at £73m.
"We're going to be increasing our frontline workforce by about a third, 333 paramedics, EMTs and patient care service staff" said Brian.
"We'll also have to look at increasing the size of our fleet and our stations.
"It's a big project, but it's something that we really desperately need to have a better service and better outcomes for our patients."
A new course has been set up in conjunction with Ulster University, to facilitate healthcare boards' need for paramedics to be university-qualified before going into service.
It's expected the first 48 students will go into that course in January, with the hope being to recruit staff once they have been fully trained up.
The consultation is set to run until December, at which points the results will be considered and recommendations will then go forward to the Department of Health.
Ordinarily, a Health Minister would be required to sign off on changes as radical as the ones suggested, but depending on what powers Secretary of State Karen Bradley grants to Permanent Secretaries, that may not prove necessary.