Reality of life and death on the roads for Sydney paramedics
THEY are our “frontline angels” — the paramedics responding to our calls for help. The Sunday Telegraph joined ambos Tammie Marshall and Josh Payne on their 12-hour shift as they raced to everything from drug overdoses to a worker with stomach pains.
NSW
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ON a wet Sydney evening during peak hour, NSW paramedic Josh Payne weaves in and out of traffic as he races to a triple 0 call-out.
“Get out of the way cockhead,” he yells as one driver fails to clear a path for the ambulance.
With lights and sirens blaring, the 29-year-old and his paramedic partner Tammie Marshall turn on to a clogged M5, travelling down the emergency lane at 100km/h.
They’re heading to Riverwood, in southwest Sydney, to reports of a 45-year-old man passed out in a car from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning.
“This sort of work hardly ever happens,” Ms Marshall, 35, says.
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Arriving at the scene, it’s quickly determined the man hasn’t been gassed — he has overdosed on heroin behind the wheel of his ute in the middle of busy Belmore Rd.
“He’s come to the traffic lights and stopped and then that’s when the heroin has hit him; that’s when he’s had the overdose,” Ms Marshall says.
“He could have killed someone.”
After he’s injected with naloxone, a drug to reverse the effects of heroin, the man gains consciousness.
In less than 10 minutes, Mr Payne and Ms Marshall have dealt with a potentially deadly call-out, their fifth job in eight hours, and they still have another four hours left to go in their shift.
This is just another day in the life for paramedics at Bankstown Superstation, the busiest ambulance base in the state.
The Sunday Telegraph was given exclusive access to the station which responds to at least 170 triple-0 calls each day.
And for the first time, the public will watch NSW paramedics at work in the new reality television program Ambulance Australia, airing on Network 10 from Tuesday, October 16, at 7.30pm.
Mr Payne and Ms Marshall are two of the show’s paramedic stars, which involved embedding TV crews with ambulances across Sydney for three months and rigging $250,000 worth of cameras in vans to capture every moment.
“I just want to go to the Logies,” Mr Payne said.
He’d like to knock the Bondi Rescue boys off their reality TV perch.
The gritty, new fly-on-the-wall program is based on the award-winning UK program Ambulance, which had a dramatic effect when first screened on the BBC.
Two-fifths of Brits said they would think twice about calling for an ambulance, while more than half would understand if crews were delayed to a non-life-threatening situation.
NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said Ambulance Australia would help the community understand that paramedics are our “frontline angels”.
“I’m actually very fed up, as the NSW Health Minister, with the attacks and negative responses that come with some sections of the community,” Mr Hazzard told The Sunday Telegraph.
“I’m hoping this sends a very clear message that these people are potentially the people that keep you or your friends and family alive.”
Mr Payne, the son of NSW Ambulance assistant commissioner Peter Payne and a paramedic for the past seven years, said he also hoped the series would have a positive impact.
“Hopefully it informs people on what is an acceptable reason to call an ambulance,” he said in between jobs at Bankstown Hospital.
“Some people are just uneducated. I grew up around ambulances so unless I was dying, you’d never think to call an ambulance.”
He said ambulances get called for “every little thing”.
During their shift on Thursday, Mr Payne and Ms Marshall attend a Greenacre nursing home after an elderly patient removed her feeding tube.
The 86-year-old was transported to Bankstown Hospital to have her tube reinserted, with Mr Payne saying call-outs of this kind to nursing homes are common.
A few hours later, a triple-0 call is made for a 25-year-old with a headache.
“Around this area, we have a high level of people on a pension card so we’re a free service,” Mr Payne said.
On average, each call-out takes 90 minutes.
The language barriers in south west Sydney are also problematic.
“On two out of three jobs, they don’t speak English,” Ms Marshall said.
“It does make it a lot harder. I think a lot gets lost in translation.”
And then there’s the risk of assault on the job and other dangers.
The previous day, two of their colleagues were driving at 80km/h at Yagoona to a triple-0 call when a teenage boy pelted a rock at the side window of their ambulance.
Another crew then had to be diverted to the emergency.
But both Mr Payne and Ms Marshall wouldn’t dream of doing another job.
A paramedic for six years, Ms Marshall said she woke up one day and said ‘I want to be an ambo’.
“I told my family and they said ‘you don’t like the sight of blood, you’re gonna faint, you can’t do it’,” the mother of two young boys said.
“It’s the best thing I ever did.”
The NSW Ambulance Service is a way of life for father of two Mr Payne, with his wife Lucy a dispatcher at the Sydney Control Centre.
Mr Payne said he was most affected by jobs that reminded him of his children and his loved ones.
“My first cardiac arrest was a 50-something-year-old male and that was the same age as my Dad at the time,” he said.
“I suppose they’re jobs that get to you the most.
“I’ve seen people that should have survived that haven’t, and those who shouldn’t survive and have, and that’s when you realise that when your time’s up, your time’s up.”