13-government-services-2013-chapter9

Box 9.16 Availability of ambulance officers/paramedics
‘Availability of ambulance officers/paramedics’ is defined as the number of full
time equivalent ambulance officers/paramedics per 100 000 people. Ambulance
officers/paramedics includes student and base level ambulance officers and qualified
ambulance officers but excludes patient transport officers.
High or increasing availability of ambulance officers/paramedics per 100 000 people
(indicating high or increasing ambulance service availability) is desirable.
The role of paramedics is expanding to provide primary health care, improve
emergency response capabilities and strengthen community healthcare collaborations
in rural and remote communities (Stirling et al. 2007). Many rural and remote
communities do not have access to adequate health care due, in part, to the difficulty
of recruiting and retaining health professionals. Paramedics provide some of these
communities with extended access to health service delivery. Expanding roles are also
developing in metropolitan areas as a response to overstretched emergency
departments where paramedics can continue caring for patients on arrival at hospital.
This indicator needs to be interpreted with care because ambulance responses in
some jurisdictions, particularly in rural and remote locations, are predominantly
provided by volunteers. Therefore the results reported may indicate a lower level of
access for these jurisdictions. However, this indicator is complemented by the
response locations indicator, which identifies jurisdictions that provide an ambulance
response utilising volunteers. The higher the proportion of paramedics in a jurisdiction
the higher the cost of service provision. In small rural areas which have low frequency
of medical emergencies it is very costly to provide paramedic personnel and it also
raises issues with skills maintenance for paramedics when the caseload they are
exposed to is low.
Data for this indicator are not directly comparable.
Data quality information for this indicator is under development.
Nationally, there were 45.9 FTE ambulance officers (including student and base
level officers) per 100 000 people in 2011-12, which varied across jurisdictions
(table 9A.33 and figure 9.22).
9.48 REPORT ON
GOVERNMENT
SERVICES 2013