NSW Labor says hundreds of paramedics will be dispatched to take pressure off rural and regional hospitals if it wins next year's state election.
The Opposition has unveiled the first tranche of a $500 million health package which involves hiring an extra 500 paramedics and placing them in communities most in need.
Opposition leader Chris Minns said his party wanted to make sure paramedics had the skills to do more work in the field to take pressure off the public hospital system.
"If we can get paramedics doing more clinical work in the region, on site, it means that there is less of a pressure for transporting those people to an emergency department in a NSW public hospital," Mr Minns said.
He said the exact locations of the new recruits would be decided after consultation with health professionals.
Labor health spokesman Ryan Park said there was a critical shortage, particularly in the area of extended care and intensive care paramedics.
Pressures on paramedics
A New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into rural, regional and remote health services has previously heard of the workload pressures paramedics were under in rural and regional locations.
Witnesses told hearings they sometimes worked back-to-back shifts or left their communities unstaffed while transferring non-urgent patients.
Health Services Union secretary Gerard Hayes said Labor's proposal would speed up response times, improve patient outcomes and decrease fatigue on paramedics.
The inquiry was also urged to consider allowing paramedics to provide a higher level of clinical care than they currently did, particularly in light of the shortage of doctors and nurses in some smaller hospitals.
Mr Hayes said the union heartened by Labor's promise to train more intensive and extended care paramedics.
"As an ex-intensive care paramedic, the treatment that you can get in an emergency department you can get at your home, in your workplace or on the roadside," Mr Hayes said.
He said intensive care paramedics could intubate people and give life-saving drugs.
"Not only is this investment now will be an up-front saving of lives, it will be a back-end saving for the government," he said.
Mr Park said paramedics were his party's first election funding commitment, rather than nurses and doctors, because they were the first port of call for many rural communities.
"We start with paramedics because often they're the first people we need ... this is not our only health announcement," Mr Park said.
"We need to be about fixing health services, less about ribbon cutting on new buildings, more about making sure communities have access to the services they need and there's no more important access to services in health to a triple 0 paramedic."
Premier Dominic Perrottet said his government's investment exceeded the Labor announcement.
"We've committed four times as much," Mr Perrottet said.
"We've committed 2,000, they're committing 500."
He said the government had invested $1.76 billion dollars for paramedics in this year's budget.
"We put our paramedics where they're needed," he said.
