The East Midlands Ambulance Service recently proposed major cuts to its services across the region. There was a public consultation late last year and a review of how the entire service is being run and managed.
The proposed plan is to cut 66 of its stations and focus instead on investing in frontline services.
The hope is that cutting down the number of actual stations within the East Midlands, and introducing new standby points for staff to rest and wait for calls will help improve services within the resources available.
But what does this actually mean as far as the quality of the service is concerned?
And what impact would cutting down all these stations have on all the people who are employed by those local services?
Would simply installing ‘standby points’ for services be enough to tackle the growing demand for these emergency services, and would it help deliver the best service?
It is questions like these that must be considered carefully before making such a significant move.
The East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) has been consistently failing to meet response time targets for the past few years. It held a public consultation to get feedback about the proposed changes and the official tack about the cuts has always been that these changes will help manage resources better, and would not in fact have any impact on the quality of services.
The government maintains that cutting down so many stations will not compromise on the service and put people’s lives at risk.
East Midlands Ambulance Service plans to divert funds to building super stations and investing more money in these instead of maintaining a higher number of stations.
But many paramedics are of the opinion that the money would be much better spent on ambulances!
UNISON has raised major concerns over these proposed changes, and expressed fears that contrary to what the EMAS claims, cutting down stations will make the service even more inefficient, increase response times, and consequently put many lives at a much higher level of risk.
Many paramedics have also said that there are flaws in the service’s plans to cut down stations and increase standby points. One of the perceived flaws is that stand by points may not have enough resources and ambulances to tackle a major situation that may need them.
Such a major downsizing seems more of a knee-jerk reaction than anything else, and simply a way to cut costs and reduce spending.
But is it wise to cut spending at the cost of compromised quality when it comes to emergency services?
EMAS has predicted that about 47 posts will be made redundant during this overhaul.
This may help save money in the short term, but does cutting down the number of paramedic jobs, compromising on the quality of key services and putting paramedics under increased stress and pressure make long term sense?
Austerity measures are the buzz word today, but short-sighted and rash measures can cause long term damage to the most important services in our society.
Image: bbc.co.uk
