Ambulance vehicles outside Lismore Base Hospital. Jacklyn Wagner

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A PARAMEDIC says a new “blanket rule” has come into place that “no off-duty ambulance officer was to be called out” for jobs. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

In one instance, he said, a Maclean ambulance was tasked to a man with chest pain in South Grafton because both Grafton day crews were already on jobs.

“He ended up having a cardiac arrest and dying,” he said.

“If an off-duty Grafton crew was sent to that job, there’s every chance that he would have received the right treatment and survived … chest pains should always be deemed as serious, ask any doctor.”

A Northern Rivers man who suffered a stroke this week is believed to have waited half an hour for paramedics because of the NSW Ambulance Service’s new “business plan” to reduce overtime.

The Northern Star has learnt that a woman called 000 from her Tweed Heads West homeafter her husband suddenly collapsed.

It is understood the ambulance control centre chose to wait 20 minutes for an on-duty Murwillumbah ambulance to finish unloading another patient at Tweed Heads Hospital instead of immediately tasking an on-call Kingscliff ambulance to the job. This meant the man waited 30 minutes.When the paramedics arrived, they discovered his wife had tried to drag him several metres towards an inclinator to get him upstairs.

He survived and was transported to Tweed Heads Hospital.

Another source said paramedics were furious with the new guidelines.

“When you get to a pensioner who has been lying on the floor waiting an hour for an ambulance, it makes you angry,” he said.

A spokesman for the NSW Ambulance Service confirmed new “on-call guidelines using duty crews from 24/7 stations for non-urgent cases had been implemented across NSW … to strengthen existing procedures and policies within Ambulance to ensure the effective and efficient usage of valuable emergency resources”.

He added that: “The Ambulance Service would like to reassure the community that the new guidelines will not impact on service delivery and we will continue to provide the best pre-hospital clinical care to all patients throughout the state.”