South West ambulance workers witness deaths due to delays
One in four ambulance workers has witnessed a death due to delays in the past three years.
A recent poll by union GMB of 3,000 ambulance workers found 24.4% of ambulance workers had witnessed a death due to delays during the past three years.
Whilst two in five had spent an entire shift waiting outside accident and emergency departments in the same period.
The GMB said its study revealed that seven out of 10 ambulance staff surveyed, including control centre workers and call handlers, have considered leaving the service in the past year.
One worker described being first on the scene at a cardiac arrest, which had been coded 'yellow' for 10 hours, to find the patient dead, in rigor mortis with the phone ringing in his hands.
Other workers described patients regularly dying in hospital corridors, patients being left for days outside in ambulances, and being told it would be quicker for them to make their own way to hospital, and then dying on route.
The survey is being discussed at the union's annual congress in Bournemouth today.
Lib Whitefield, South West Union Representative, said: "The mental health impact of working in the ambulance service day to day is significant. It's really common for members of the ambulance service to suffer from PTSD because of the type of job they do. In any situation they can be called out to really traumatic incidents.
"When staff are going out and seeing unnecessary deaths because there aren't enough staff, vehicles, or enough funding, we're seeing a huge rise in PTSD and staff going off sick because they just cannot cope."
The union are hoping the next government will properly invest in the NHS.