More than 500 Scottish Ambulance Service staff were absent from work with mental health or stress issues in just four months.
The Record has been telling of the crisis in the SAS for months, with spiralling ambulance turnaround times, queues outside hospitals to deliver patients and lengthy waiting times for ambulances to arrive for desperately ill patients – resulting in deaths.
A Freedom of Information request has revealed in the four months between September 2021 and January 2022, 553 members of staff needed to take time off work due to mental health or stress issues.
Paramedics and technicians who operate at the sharp end, battling to save patients’ lives, have been the worst affected with a total of 277 absences. But other workers have also been affected.
Care assistants, call handlers and dispatchers and even clerical staff have felt the increased pressure on the service.
Now Scottish Labour, who obtained the FOI statistics, said action must be taken now to support ambulance service staff at risk of burnout.
Labour health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie hit out at the “troubling” spate of stress-related absences and called on the Health Secretary to act to support staff to keep them safe.
She said: “Scotland’s ambulance service has been in crisis all winter, with waiting times spiralling and lives being tragically lost.
“But throughout the winter, ambulance staff have risen to the challenge and worked tirelessly despite little support from an uninterested SNP government.
“These statistics clearly show the human toll of the SNP’s mismanagement of the ambulance service.
“Make no mistake, this SNP government is risking the mental health of hundreds of ambulance workers and, by extension, the physical health of the people of Scotland.
“Last week, Scottish Labour published our Charter for Valuing our Health and Social Care Staff, outlining what the Scottish Government could do right now to retain our existing workforce and recruit more by improving conditions for health and social care staff.
“Addressing mental health and wellbeing is critical – we need to ensure that all staff can access appropriate support and deliver a culture of safe and healthy work.
“Ambulance workers perform a vital and hugely demanding role – it’s time Humza Yousaf valued them properly and gave them the support they need and deserve.”
Pat Rafferty, Scottish Secretary of trade union Unite, called the figures ”extraordinary yet unsurprisingly high”.
Rafferty said: “The SAS continue to be unwilling to recognise the extraordinary efforts of staff when it comes to duty of care to them, and mobile staff are offered little by way of support or legal rest breaks.”
Last night, an SAS spokeswoman said the pandemic had put “unprecedented pressure on our hardworking and dedicated staff and their welfare remains one of our top priorities”.
She added: “We are accelerating recruitment of new staff and over 500 new staff will have joined the service by end of the March.”
Health Secretary Humza Yousaf said a further investment of £20million had been set out as part of the £1billion NHS recovery plan to introduce new ambulances and almost 300 additional staff.
He added: “This increase in staffing and resources, aligned to new shift patterns and demand, aims to improve both patient safety and staff welfare.”
