Paramedics commuting to jobs in UK from Cork

DESPITE admitted shortages in HSE staff, a paramedic living in Schull is having to commute to the UK for work because, she believes, the HSE is currently not recruiting any qualified staff.

Employment opportunities for paramedics are so restricted in Ireland, said Kerry Queally, that qualified frontline staff are travelling for work in the UK.

The Irish citizen, who has 18 years frontline experience working in London and Essex, and is registered in Ireland as a paramedic, has been trying to secure similar employment in West Cork.

‘It’s my understanding,’ said Kerry, ‘that students are being recruited as part of the paramedic programme, but positions for fully qualified staff are not being advertised.

‘I’d love nothing more than to use my skills and training in West Cork, where I have lived for the last eight years,’ she told The Southern Star.

Kerry, who lives in Schull, commutes on a Thursday to the UK with another colleague, who lives in Cork city, and returns on a Monday.

It’s a journey that takes her six hours door-to-door. The journey begins when Kerry leaves her home at 2.45am on a Thursday to be at work at 9am the same morning. After working four 12-hour shifts for a private ambulance firm, Kerry takes the first flight from Stansted back to Cork on Monday morning.

Kerry was prompted to talk to The Southern Star after our recent front page article detailing the pressures the ambulance service is under in West Cork.

In that article, a paramedic said that a consistent shortage in the number of staff required to operate the region’s eight ambulances had resulted in reduced daytime and night-time cover.

He pointed out that there are four ambulance bases in West Cork – Skibbereen, Clonakilty, Bantry and Castletownbere, each of which has two ambulances – but on one weekend in July there was no night-time cover in Skibbereen or Castletownbere.

Kerry said there had also been a recruitment problem in the UK until they resolved the problem by recruiting directly from universities in Australia.

A spokesperson for the HSE said that it will be advertising next March for qualified paramedics with an intake planned for later in 2024.

The HSE also said that in January and June of this year the National Ambulance Service (NAS) advertised two competitions for student paramedics and these competitions were oversubscribed.

As a result of these competitions, approximately 340 student paramedics will be awarded places in the NAS college to train and study to become fully qualified paramedics.

‘We are also running an intermediate care operative recruitment campaign on October 27th, and an emergency medical controller recruitment campaign on November 6th,’ said the spokesperson.