Dangerously long hours for paramedics in Victoria

EXHAUSTED paramedics in Victoria have fallen asleep at the wheel and made mistakes drawing up drugs as their fatigue levels reached dangerously high levels. Ninety-eight per cent of 346 paramedics who took part in a union survey, to be released today, said they experienced workplace fatigue in the past 12months. More than one-third had to leave shifts prematurely because of fatigue, and 87 per cent said fatigue had affected their judgment while at work.

A number of paramedics said they had fallen asleep while driving ambulances. "I've been so tired I've drawn up the wrong drug and nearly given it to a patient," said one Melbourne paramedic, who declined to be named. Another wrote that he became "so fatigued that I fall asleep whilst driving at work (occasionally) and on the way to and from home (most days)". One employee said he was working overtime and "had to contact the duty team manager and inform him that I had actually driven past the hospital after falling asleep at the wheel, (and) being woken by my partner's shouts".

Ambulance Employees Australia Victorian secretary Steve McGhie said the findings were a wake-up call to the Brumby Government and the ambulance service. "These findings are a clear sign that our ambulance system is in crisis and that Premier Brumby has taken his eye off the ball," he said. "Will it take a paramedic or patient dying before Premier Brumby fixes this crisis? "We urgently need a major increase in ambulance funding for additional paramedics. "Extra staff will help reduce the workload of paramedics, enable them to get proper meal and rest breaks and have some down time between cases."

Mr McGhie said paramedics, patients and the broader community were being put at risk by fatigue arising from an extreme workload and "dangerous" rostering arrangements. "For the last few years, ambulance caseload has increased at a much higher rate than operational staffing levels," he said. "The Victorian Government likes talking about how it has doubled ambulance funding since it came to power, but in recent years funding has not kept pace with escalating caseloads."

According to the survey, paramedics said their workloads and the fact they often had no meal break or rest break during shifts of up to 14 hours were key reasons for their fatigue. "Jobs never seem to go smoothly when I'm fatigued," a rural paramedic said. "I'm slower to process what needs to be done. You leave equipment at the scene. It's very hard to stay awake driving at night, especially long distances like we have in the country. "Lucky I haven't had to work out drug calculations while fatigued, but it's only a matter of time."

A Melbourne paramedic said that "on a couple of occasions, on night shift I have had to try to calculate drug doses". "One was for a child that needed to be sedated and intubated," he said. "I was completely incapable of it. I had to rely totally on the dose and volumes calculated by my partner. I couldn't assist by even confirming his calculations. "My mind had turned off due to fatigue."

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Dangerously long hours for paramedics in Queensland

SOME Queensland paramedics are working punishing shifts of up to 17 hours despite a recruitment drive that has so far netted more than 200 additional officers. Ambulance Employees Australia's Steve Crowe said yesterday the amount of overtime being worked also raised concerns about how many extra hours ambulance officers would do when new 12-hour shifts - designed to better spread resources - were introduced later this year. "Demand for services is skyrocketing. We've identified at least six examples of paramedics working 14 to 17 hours straight in recent weeks," he said. "I don't know how widespread it is yet, but if I was a manager of a station and I had someone working seven hours' overtime, I'd be horrified."

Shadow emergency services minister Ted Malone said he also had reports of 14 to 15-hour shifts, while a QAS spokesman said records showed that at March 2 only 3.2 per cent of shifts had an extension greater than two hours this year.

Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts said the government was on track to meet its target of 250 new recruits in 2007-08, with more than 200 already on board. Another 100 frontline officers would also be appointed following the findings of last year's audit. He said the extra staff would help cope with the unprecedented and increasing demand facing the QAS. ``Last financial year the QAS attended over 815,000 calls for assistance, averaging around one call every 39 seconds,'' he said. ``Already this year, the QAS has attended more than 610,000 call-outs.''

Mr Crowe said another 700 paramedics were required to meet demand.

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Australia's self-inflicted African problem

POLICE are advising the Immigration Department for the first time about how and where to settle troubled African refugees. Senior Victorian police have urged the department to settle Sudanese families in country towns such as Mildura and Sale, away from suburban Melbourne where young African men are being caught up in street crime. The Australian understands that police first appealed to immigration officials last year following a spike in criminal activity among young Sudanese men, while Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon was attempting to play down the problem. Sudanese gang violence escalated last September, with the fatal bashing of 19-year-old Liep Gony near Noble Park railway station, in Melbourne's east.

Police advised against settling Sudanese in "dysfunctional areas" such as housing commission flats in Melbourne's north and east, and a growing number of the 15,000-member state community are now living in Mildura, Sale and Wonthaggi. African Think Tank chairman Berhan Ahmed yesterday praised the rural settlement, saying it would help the Sudanese integrate, find work and avoid drugs, alcohol and street crime. "The influence of drugs and alcohol will not be there [You're kidding!], and it will be much easier for kids and refugee families to adjust in rural areas," he said.

Dr Ahmed - a Melbourne University senior research fellow studying refugees living in rural Victoria and their city counterparts - said young Africans living in the country were more likely to perform better at school and get work. While it was difficult to resettle refugees who were already living in Melbourne, he said the Brumby Government could offer them better housing and jobs to encourage them to move. "You entice them by giving them opportunities," he said.

Victoria Police's multicultural liaison officer, Joseph Herrech said helping Sudanese refugees to settle in Melbourne was a challenge for immigration officials and police. He said grouping the Sudanese together at times led to crime-related problems, and separating them often exacerbated their emotional hardship. "We've recommended to Immigration that they be spread out slightly more," he said.

Other police recommendations to the immigration department include developing better pre-departure programs for humanitarian refugees to educate them more about Australian culture, the judicial process and the law-enforcement agencies. Police sources have told The Australian that gangs involving Sudanese men, including African Power and the Bloods and Crips - inspired by the Los Angeles-based crime groups - have grown in numbers and become more of a concern in the suburbs of Collingwood and Carlton.

Former immigration minister Kevin Andrews decided to cut back the African refugee intake last year amid fears they were not "settling and adjusting" into Australian life.

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Rudd to slice red tape

Sounds good. In the right direction, anyway

The Rudd Government will today further expand its deregulation agenda, adding food, electronic conveyancing and mine safety to the 16 areas under consideration. But the move, to be discussed at the Council of Australian Governments meeting in Adelaide, is expected to delay by several months proposals that have been in the pipeline for some years. COAG is expected to hail its success in clearing the political hurdles for a range of bureaucratic hotspots identified two years ago. This includes producing nationally consistent environmental assessments and approvals, product safety regulations, rail safety and a national system of trade measurements.

But as the process becomes bigger and the list of legislation longer, pressing issues such as financial credit protection for people using mortgage brokers, margin lending or non-bank borrowing, will be roped together and dealt with in a legislative discussion or green paper. In the case of protection for people using mortgage brokers, the move will further delay a five-year process that was on the verge of completion after NSW drafted legislation for COAG to consider last year.

The move has angered credit reform advocates, including the NSW Consumer Credit Legal Centre. "This is ridiculous," solicitor Katherine Lane said yesterday. "Every day that goes past is a day without protections, with no licensing, no recourse to dispute resolution regimes - none of these consumer protection measures we desperately need."

Uniform guidelines on how business reports to governments are designed to make it easier for companies to meet their obligations. "At present, business has to report financial information separately to different government agencies and in different formats, imposing a heavy compliance burden," says the COAG report to be delivered to the Prime Minister, premiers and chief ministers. "By eliminating unnecessary or duplicated reporting the project will reduce the volume of complexity of reporting business to government."

In a rare move the commonwealth will defer its administrative responsibility on environmental assessments and approvals to the states. Where the commonwealth agrees to a state's assessment it will not then re-visit the same issues when an approval is granted for a project. It is a move which would prevent a repeat of the 2006 incident where the commonwealth used the threatened orange-bellied parrot to derail a Victorian-approved windfarm.

Some of the new areas being added to the COAG deregulation agenda may contradict other proposals. A push by South Australia for others to copy its laws allowing identical labels for domestically-sold and export bottles of wine may run into problems in a push for graphic health warnings on alcohol. Graphic warnings may not be acceptable for export bottles, reversing the estimated $60 million saving the SA approach has delivered.

The Business Council of Australia, which estimates that duplicated regulation costs business $16 billion annually, yesterday welcomed renewed commitments from the federal Government to accelerate the national reform agenda under COAG.

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Aussie soldiers turn noses up at ration packs

This Easter many Australian soldiers serving in Iraq will open their ration packs with disappointment. Forget the chocolate eggs; nutritionists say the traditional Australian army rations aren't appetising enough. Soldiers are refusing to eat the rations and their health and morale is suffering as a result, and the Army is spending thousands of dollars to make ration packs more appetising. It seems hard to believe, but experts say the success of military operations is being compromised by the unpalatable ration packs given to our troops.

Australia is part of a hot region and most defence personnel are deployed to high temperature zones. Soldiers stationed overseas are becoming sick, lethargic and they're under-performing, because they can't bring themselves to eat their pre-packed hot meals. Chris Forbes-Ewan, a nutritionist with Defence Science and Technology Organisation in Tasmania, says the reason for that is pretty clear that people lose appetite in the heat. "The current pack includes meals that need to be heated to be fully edible; main meals spaghetti bolognese and beef with noodles and sweet and sour foods and these sorts of things," he said. "Also freeze-dried rice and potato and onion powder."

Mr Forbes-Ewan says soldiers need to be given mission-specific ration packs according to the climate they'll be working in. "While food plays an enormous role in morale, quite often the only thing the soldier has to look forward to is his, or her next meal," he said.

Naturally his team's priority was to develop a hot-weather combat pack, and they've already made a prototype. "The new pack consists mainly of grazing type foods, eat-on-the-move goods," he said. "[It includes] trail mix, energy bars, sports bars, sports drink, beef jerky is another one." The nutritionist says a new heat-resistant Army chocolate is also on the drawing board. "It's a mood lifter, because it is so popular, it's a good food to fortify with vitamins," he said.

The new hot weather combat supplies are being trialed at the Land Command Battle School near Tully in far north Queensland. The Federal Minister for Defence Personnel, Warren Snowden, is optimistic the soldiers will like it. "Soldiers weren't that happy with the current ration packs and weren't eating enough of the ration pack food in the field," he said. "They are being required to undertake high intensity physical work, which is very stressful, for days at a time often, and we need to make sure that they're operating at their best, not only for their own safety but so that they can complete the missions, which they are being tasked to do and that is the defence of Australia."

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