Ambulance crews forced to work in rotting 1950s building

From this week’s Galway City Tribune – Picture the scene. You’re a paramedic with an ambulance crew and have responded to a fatal road traffic accident on the Headford Road.

What awaits at the scene is horrendous, but you and your colleagues remain professional and carry out your duties to the best of your abilities, including saving lives and rushing any injured people back to University Hospital Galway for further treatment.

It’s your job and you’re paid for it but it’s still traumatic. When you arrive back at base, what you want is a bit of privacy, to debrief and process what just happened on the call-out.

You might want to have a lie down, maybe make a cup of tea, change your blood-stained clothes and generally relax before the next call-out – possibly a suicide or fire – which could be equally as stressful.

A proper facility to allow staff to ‘debrief’ and do all these things doesn’t sound too much to ask. It’s the norm in Castlebar, where the ambulance base was recently modernised; and in Nenagh, which has a purpose-built facility for ambulance crew.

But that’s not the case in UHG. In Galway ambulance staff – be they Emergency Medical Technicians, Paramedics or Advanced Paramedics – are returning to what they themselves describe as a “kip”.

“You could’ve come off a very traumatic call and you come back to a shithole,” said one frontline worker. “The first problem is it’s not big enough for the amount of staff we have. The second thing is it’s a total kip. We can’t continue on in that squalor. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I don’t think people would believe that a service that is perceived so highly by the public is treated like this. We’re not prima donnas. We don’t want much.”

The Galway City Tribune visited the ambulance base at UHG, to view the conditions at the building.
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