Staff at St John Ambulance in WA are deeply unhappy with the way the organisation is being run and few have faith in its leadership, a damning internal survey has revealed.
The St John WA Culture Survey 2022, obtained by ABC Radio Perth, showed staff overwhelmingly felt St John needed to lift its game across a wide range of areas.
These include workload and staffing, leadership, processes, supervision, cross-unit cooperation and communication, learning and development and consulting and listening to staff.
Almost 2,000 employees completed the survey.
Its release comes less than two months after the resignation of St John WA chief executive Michelle Fyfe and amid unprecedented pressure on the service, including record ambulance ramping and a surge in COVID-19 cases that contributed to delays fuelled by high demand.
At least two deaths were linked to issues with the service in less than a month.
Little faith in leadership
The survey found just 22 per cent of respondents agreed that "the way St John is run has improved over the past year", a fall of 26 per cent on the last survey result in 2019.
Only 24 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that "change is handled well at St John", an 11 per cent drop on the 2019 survey.
And only 25 per cent agreed with the statement "St John is good at learning from its mistakes", a 15 per cent fall on the 2019 result.
Only a quarter of respondents appeared to have faith in St John leadership and agreed that "the executive team listen to staff and volunteers".
Ambulance problems nationwide
Issues with ambulances, particularly ramping, have been growing in every state and territory.
In Victoria, ramping was associated with dozens of preventable deaths even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
A May 2022 report from the Australian Medical Association on ambulance ramping showed that all states and territories were falling short of their performance targets.
While the measures used to report on ambulance ramping differ between states and territories, South Australia was arguably the poorest performer, with 54.1 per cent of patients off a stretcher in 30 minutes.
In NSW a parliamentary inquiry into ambulance ramping was announced last month as the state recorded the longest wait times since records were made public.
And a similar inquiry into WA's ambulance service in May recommended St John be given five years to clean up its act — or the WA government would take control itself.
Less than three weeks ago a woman in her 70s died in Tasmania after waiting in an ambulance to be admitted to an emergency department for more than nine hours.
Her death came just weeks after a 13-year-old boy suffering an asthma attack stopped breathing in a taxi on the way to hospital after the child's mother was told no ambulances were available.
And in Queensland the number of patients left waiting in ambulances at emergency departments increased by 3 per cent in the June quarter.
Staff committed to their jobs
But a strong majority of respondents to the WA survey said they were satisfied and committed to St John.
More than 90 per cent of respondents said they had good relationships with co-workers, an increase on the 2019 survey, while over 80 per cent said they liked the work they did, had a feeling of personal accomplishment and understood their roles.
However, respondents believed St John was "down on performance and improvement (was) needed".
St John WA chief executive Anthony Smithson and chairman Shayne Leslie said the board and executive team were committed to taking action to address key areas.
A WA parliamentary inquiry earlier this year recommended St John be given five years to improve its delivery of services.
In a written response to the survey results, the WA government said it had outlined its strategy to revamp ambulance services, and said it would evaluate "whether the contract delivers sufficient value for WA taxpayers to warrant its longer-term continuation".
Improvements made: Premier
While Premier Mark McGowan said he had not yet read the report, he said the state government was doing everything it could to work with St John to improve the service.
"St John's is an outsourced service, it's a private organisation, it is not controlled by government so this survey will give St John a road map to improve their operations and their activities," he said.
"I have a huge amount of time for paramedics, considering the sorts of things that they do and see, and the workforce needs to be taken account of, but that's why we put a range of measures in place to ensure that St John improves its service for the public as well.
"We've embedded senior staff in St John, we've undertaken a parliamentary inquiry, there's been some leadership changes there and we have a range of expectations of St John to ensure that the service continues to get better.
"We've intervened more in St John than any government in history ever has and so whatever is required to be done to improve the service we will do."
Survey 'disappointing'
Nationals MP Colin De Grussa was on a parliamentary committee which looked into St John's performance in WA, and said the results of the St John Culture Survey were not surprising.
"In any organisation, obviously, the culture of that organisation has a dramatic impact on the performance of the organisation and the retention of staff and all that sort of thing as well." he said.
"It is, in my view, a real opportunity for leadership to step up and address those issues.
"At a board level, if you're seeing these sort of results, the first thing you'd want to do is actually acknowledge them and know that you've got these issues to deal with and then start actually doing something about it.
"It's very disappointing to see a lot of these metrics have gone backwards significantly since 2019."
