Paramedics 'up in arms' amid ruling that they can't keep wheelchairs on ambulances

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

Paramedics are ‘up in arms’ following a ‘national’ ruling that will ‘remove wheelchairs from ambulances, they say. North West Ambulance Service paramedics are calling on their bosses to prevent the incoming 'specification', claiming ‘these wheelchairs are the only safe method of transporting patients from their property to the ambulance’.

The North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) is understood to be the only ambulance service in the country that currently stores wheelchairs on ambulances, which emergency service staff use to get patients from their home into the back of the vehicle.

But following a national specification, paramedics say the redesign of future ambulances means there will no longer be room for the wheelchairs.

The ambulances are equipped with carry chairs operating on two wheels, on which patients are tipped back and rolled. But these chairs ‘are designed to carry people on stairs’, and are ‘not safe for wheeling patients over any distance’, add the paramedics. READ MORE:Greater Manchester faces new drugs crisis as patients living in agony wait years for surgery, doctors warn Since wheelchairs were brought onto NWAS vehicles ‘several years ago’, the number of injuries staff have sustained has also dropped ‘dramatically’, according to NWAS Unison branch secretary Jeff Gorman. “We’ve got wheelchairs on our current ambulances and the next lot, but after that it looks like they won’t,” he told the Manchester Evening News . “It’s come on the back of a national specification for ambulances which don't have a wheelchair on them.