How Working for Ambulance Tasmania Became Like an Abusive Relationship

It sounds extreme, but somehow my career as a paramedic with Ambulance Tasmania has become like having an abusive boyfriend.

Having worked in the business of emergency health care for more than a decade, I consider myself an experienced paramedic and after all that time, I still love my job.

I love helping people, I love working with the entire cross section of the community and I love the trust people I care for have in both my abilities and my personal attributes.

I love my colleagues, who are some of the best people I know. That’s why its so surprising that I find my work has become like an abusive relationship.

Multiple reviews and coronial inquests have found Ambulance Tasmania lacking. Each time, the CEO or minister of the moment reassures us, the front line staff, that things will get better. Because we paramedics love what we do, we continue to trust their word that things will improve.

Yet the more change there is, the more it stays the same. And like an abusive lover, we frontline paramedics keep falling in love with the job, over and over despite our ongoing abuse.

We stay quiet, and don’t mention the problems, the sleepless nights and the anxiety caused by our work, because we are scared of losing our jobs should we speak out.

Only under oath, in the coronial hearings of 2021, were paramedics able to be honest without fear of reprisal. And what did we hear about? Consistent themes of fear, bullying and victimisation. We even heard about threats of rape. Like an abusive relationship, the silence of the victims is telling. The few with the courage to try and hold the organisation to account know they do so at great peril.

The message is clear: speak out and you will be punished. Your promotion will be blocked at every opportunity and your life made hell by vindictive managers. But its ok, we have a therapy dog now. Like a new necklace from your abusive lover, you should be thankful and above all you should be quiet.

Thus so the abuse continues. Last year’s ‘resilience scan’ was a revealing. When asked what the biggest threat to personal safety while at work was, more than 95% of respondents said it was their manager. Bear in mind we are workers who drive four tonne vehicles at high speed in all conditions, attend every type of premises in the early hours of the morning, sometimes on our own, and regularly associate with drunks, drug affected and violent criminals.

So, our bosses and abusers again tell us, they are listening and it will get better. Like an abusive relationship, we feel trapped.

We are trained to provide emergency health care but there is only one employer in the state that provides that service, so we can’t leave.

If we do leave, it means quitting the job we love or leaving the state we love. Is it worth it?

Meanwhile response times continue to deteriorate, with this week’s report on government services finding that for the seventh year in a row, Ambulance Tasmania provides the slowest response for lights and sirens jobs of any ambulance service.

More worryingly, the emergency response times have gotten worse, deteriorating by more than 10 minutes in 10 years, from 17.1 minutes in 2011 to 27.9 minutes in 2021. The best performing services can get an ambulance to you in your moment of need in half that time. The result of this is that patients are sicker when we arrive, which increases the risk of PTSD for paramedics when they watch patients who could have been saved die in front of their eyes.

Yet still we show up to the next job, the next day and the next week of work. Helping one patient in their moment of crisis at a time, all the while living a never-ending crisis of our own.

The anonymous paramedic works for Ambulance Tasmania.