To my friends and family - apologies for the lengthy post but I was just so offended by this article that I had to get it off my chest. Below is my response to the journalist who wrote this article. Unfortunately not all of those with a voice in this world have the brains or the ethics to back it up. Mr. Campbell, I am an Advanced Life Support Paramedic with four years experience on road. I work in a busy metropolitan branch in Melbourne’s North. I am your ‘average’ paramedic and I have taken great exception to your report. The first issue I have is you reporting that the “average” paramedic earns $93,000, with overtime included. Please consider this, the so-called “average” paramedic also includes very senior management staff who are still, technically speaking, included within that group of “average” employees. Despite their senior roles they are expected to maintain their practice as Advanced Life Support Paramedics and as such are included within this group. So you want to know what a real average paramedic earns Mr. Campbell? Probably not because it completely contradicts what your article reports and provides no weight for your juicy story on us greedy paramedics, but nonetheless I will tell you anyway. I just received my tax year payment summary and I earned . . . (drumroll please) . . . $63,944. That includes my superannuation, overtime, allowances, salary packaging . . . everything. That is what I took home, that is where my mortgage goes. That includes overtime and the fact that on 197 occasions throughout last financial year I did not get my meal break for up to three hours past due, if at all. Your next claim is that paramedics get ten weeks annual leave. This is false. We actually get six weeks annual leave and four weeks accrued days off. Semantics you might say? Accrued days off are the hours that we earn by working any and all public holidays (for which we receive no financial remuneration, if I work Chiristmas day I am paid the same as I would on any other day), nights and weekends. I receive no financial benefit if I am rostered to work a weekend over a weekday. That is where my leave comes from and I work bloody hard for it. By the time my leave rolls around not only am I mentally exhausted, I am often becoming physically unwell. It’s easy for those of you who have the pleasure of a nine to five, Monday to Friday work week to scoff at my supposed “four days off” but until you have worked true shift work you have no idea what it does to your body. Half way through a night shift I am often doubled over with abdominal cramps as my gastrointestinal system does not appreciate eating at 3am. The well documented risks associated with long term shift work, including but not limited to diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, bowel cancer, prostate cancer and mental illness, certainly aren’t attributed to the extra days off that you tout as excessive. When I go on leave I spend the first week simply trying to get my sleeping patterns under control after months straight of a rotating roster. Next you comment on the supposed sweet deal us full-time paramedics get, working a four on, four off roster. Yes, it’s true, you did get one fact correct, we work four on, four off, well done. What you so strategically omitted was the fact that the four on, four off roster comprises 46-48 rostered hours. So in our so-called ‘sweet deal’ we work more hours than those working the traditional 40-hour work week, Monday to Friday, nine to five. Add to that that we rarely leave work on time. It is commonplace for us to work 1-3 hours of incidental overtime at the end of any shift, potentially turning a fourteen-hour night shift into seventeen hours. And that four days off? It’s actually three when you consider that we finish work at seven am on day one before sleeping all day to recover from the obscenely long night shift. I am rarely awake before 4pm after a night shift. Doesn’t sound so sweet now does it? And finally you attack our sick leave. Yes, you have again managed to find an accurate detail, we do take more sick leave than the average worker. Let’s have a think about the potential reasons. Let’s consider a bad day at work for you, Mr. Campbell. Since I do not know you and your role I may only speculate, but I would guess that you probably have a relatively stressful job in that you are required to meet rigid deadlines and so forth. A bad day for you may comprise missing a deadline and suffering professional embarrassment and perhaps a reprimand from your boss. Well, Mr. Campbell, a bad day for me is doing CPR on a dead baby. It is dragging mangled bodies out of wrecked cars and listening to the drunk driver of the other vehicle scream his excuses while I work to keep the victims alive. It is being ambushed by a violent, drug affected patient and running for my life while I scramble to hit my duress button. It is cutting down a person who has hung themselves, while their family wail with grief. I don’t mean to belittle your work stressors Mr. Campbell but with all due respect, you don’t know what stress is. Did you even bother to try to examine how many of those “sickies” are taken because a paramedic had the misfortune of attending one of these cases the day before and now just needs a little time to come to terms with the nightmares that wake them from their sleep? Because I take such personal offence to your comments on our sick leave I feel the need to go on. Consider next, that paramedics are a little more prone than the average worker to contract illness. We spend our time in a very small cabin with the sickest people in our society. They cough, they vomit, they sneeze and in a confined space this equates to an increased incidence of illness contraction on our part, despite the best use of our protective equipment. Finally, it is not usually a problem for an office worker, such as yourself, to attend work with a head cold or a mild stomach bug. Your colleagues may not appreciate you sneezing at them but generally speaking it is not the type of thing that would keep you home. We on the other hand are required to be in very close proximity to the severely unwell and immunocompromised people of our community and should we attend work and pass on our head cold to them we may in fact be passing on what is a life-threatening illness to them. If you would care again for a real world example, please take mine. I have taken 2.5 sick days since the beginning of 2013. On one of the days I had gastroenteritis, which I caught from a patient at work. On the second full day off I had what I later discovered to be tonsillitis and on the half day I took off I had a phone call from a family member who needed me urgently and decided to leave work early to attend to them. Sickies? Please don’t judge what you haven’t even tried to understand. So Mr. Campbell, if ever you or your family, God forbid, has an emergency, you will call 000. A crew of paramedics will attend and we will exercise all of our professionalism, all of our knowledge and skill to ensure that we revive them, stablise them and treat their pain. That is what you and the community would expect of us, what our role compels us to do, irrespective of our own personal views of the people we attend. You, on the other hand have so blatantly rejected your professional role in this matter. Your role as media is to report the truth to the community, ensuring that bias and mistruth are shed so that when your piece goes to print you have truly informed to the best of your ability. A primary example of this is when you are expected to report on matters dealing with politics and politicians. Again, you have so unquestionably failed, reporting what was ‘spun’ by David Davis, a politician trying so desperately to justify his poor treatment of paramedics that he would go on radio touting that we earn an “average” of $93,000 annually with ten weeks “annual leave”, which is so evidently an extreme manipulation of the truth. Your failure to investigate and report truthfully on this matter leads me to believe that it is likely you prefer the uproar and outrage of an inflammatory piece over a well written, well thought out and truthful report. An so Mr. Campbell, enjoy going home to your family for dinner this evening, tucking your children in, and drifting off to a restful sleep in your own bed. We don’t have that luxury every night, while our children and being read nighttime stories by babysitters and our partners are eating dinner alone, we’re off saving lives for $63,000 a year.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 13:00:45 +0000
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