Paramedics' pay not an emergency An ambulance ramped at Frankston Hospital. Picture: Jason Sammon Source: Leader HOW much do you think paramedics are paid? How much should they be paid? To take the second question first, if you or your loved one has dropped dead in the street and one of Ambulance Victoria's finest has got your heart going again, the answer is probably: "Whatever they want." But if you are the Victorian Government trying to pay its way in straitened economic circumstances, the answer is very different. The Ambulance Employees Association has asked for a pay increase of 30 per cent this year, followed by an extra 6 per cent for the three years after that, bringing the total, according to the Government, to a whopping 48 per cent. Is this fair and reasonable? On Friday the Health Minister David Davis was on Jon Faine's radio show. The first part of the interview dealt with the case of a man who died while being transferred from Frankston Hospital and Faine raised the claim by the AEA that on some nights a third of the state's ambulances are off the road. But then Faine asked, almost as an afterthought, if he thought paramedics were paid enough. Davis began his answer with a series of motherhood statements about the important work they do before casually dropping that the most common category of paramedic earns on average $93,000 a year when overtime is added in. Faine couldn't believe what he was hearing: "Ninety- three thousand dollars!?!" That was the average - with overtime - replied the minister. And, he went on, that did not include their superannuation, which was a defined benefit scheme, unlike every other ambulance service in Australia. He might have added that our ambulance officers get 10 weeks annual leave. Most of us have to make do with four weeks annual leave plus public holidays, which adds up to six weeks. Think about that for a minute: 93 large with two months off a year and defined payout at the end. Not so bad, is it? Especially when you toss in a Fringe Benefits Tax exemption which allows you to use up to $9000 tax-free. But it's actually even sweeter than it sounds because most "full time" paramedics are actually rostered on for only 148 days a year. Unlike most of us who work Monday to Friday, the working week for a paramedic is four days on, four days off all year. So when you take out their 10 weeks of annual leave, the hard-working ambo is expected to attend work for only 148 days all up. Which, when you think about it, is fair enough. Being a paramedic is a stressful, dangerous and no doubt much of the time, very unpleasant job. Making sure they get a lot of time off makes perfect sense. If they weren't given this much leave they'd be taking sickies all the time, wouldn't they? Well, I am sorry to have to tell you but, even with their 10 weeks holidays and 148-day full working year, the average ambo still manages to be on "unplanned leave" for 16.4 days a year. That was the finding of an Auditor-Generals' report this year into unplanned leave in the emergency services. (Incidentally, the ambos weren't the worst. MFB staff are off crook 18 days on average each year.) The Auditor-General couldn't help noticing that the 124 hours of unplanned planned leave taken by the average Victorian ambo is almost twice the 65.4 hours taken by their counterparts in South Australia - even though the South Australian figure included unpaid leave. He also noticed a strange thing about the maladies that keep our ambos off the job: How often they seem to strike on weekends. The most likely days for illness to strike in the paramedic community, he found, were Friday, Saturday and Sunday. In 2011-12, between 16.8 and 17.1 per cent of all single shift absences occurred on those days, compared with 11 to 13 per cent between Monday and Thursday. So if you deduct the 16 days they are absent from work from the 148 days a year they are rostered to work, it would seem the average ambo is only working 11 days a month. Keep that figure in mind next time you hear someone from the Ambulance Employees Association lamenting the shortage of staff. And ask yourself if this sounds like a group of people who should be asking taxpayers for a 30 per cent pay rise with a straight face?