Saturday 28 December 2013

Ramping



Ramping is currently a huge issue in Australian ambulance services. As health budgets are tightened and emergency departments get busier, ambulances are having to wait longer to hand over their patients. The flow on effect to the ambulance services has been devastating, but no one wants to admit it. Crews are now tied up at hospitals rather than available. Ambulances are having to travel longer distances to get to patients, because their local resources are ramped. Paramedics are getting busier, without down time, and sometimes without meal breaks. And as a result, patients are waiting longer for their ambulance, and are more likely to get tired, hungry, inexperienced crews. Unfortunately, another side effect of the crazy workload is that paramedics are burning out and moving to greener pastures. Everyone in my degree has been warned that the average time for graduates to stay in the service within my state is three to six years. Considering it takes four years to become a qualified paramedic here, it’s not surprising that students are talking about their backup plans before we even graduate. 

Here’s a surprise for you – strippers have ramping problems, too!
If you have read the rest of my blog, you will know that Australian strippers make their income from lap dances, and very little (if any) comes from ‘tips’. So we sell (‘hustle’) lap dances. Once we have a client for a lap dance, we take them to the lap dance room or area, but on busy nights, this may be full. Then we have to wait. The time we spend waiting is not time we are paid for. We can’t take that time out of the lap dance we have sold, and it’s time during which we can’t make money. We’re effectively in limbo until a room becomes available and we can complete the transaction. On quiet nights, this is never a problem. But on a busy night, I’ve lost up to 1/5th of what I could have made to ramping. Ramping time is also risky. During this time, the client could change his mind, in which case all the time I have spent hustling and waiting is wasted. Or he could be drunk and become abusive or grabby towards other people in line, and get kicked out. 

So what can we do about ambulance ramping and response times? The simple answer is to open more hospital beds and provide more ambulances, but fixing things costs money that no one wants to spend. However the unions, professional bodies and some politicians apply constant pressure to make these things happen. As for strippers ramping? Well that’s not a public health issue, but a union would be helpful. I’ve heard a stripper union exists in Australia, but to date I’ve heard nothing about them, I can’t find them with a google search and if they were active, there are much more pressing things going on in the industry that they would have to give attention to first.