Why We Trust Our Ambos

It is chaos. A child has fallen off a climbing frame in the school playground, landing hard and twisting her arm into a horrible compound fracture. Bone has pierced the skin and blood is dripping over the grass. You scramble for your mobile phone and try to keep the hordes of screaming kids away.

You are the only adult on the scene. Six minutes seems like an age as you helplessly try to comfort the injured child, wondering what first aid you should be applying, not knowing how to help her pain. Then, far off, is the sound you’ve been straining to hear – the wail of the ambulance siren. Relief. Help has arrived.

Anyone who has had to call an ambulance will know the feeling: the calm efficiency paramedics engender when all around us is out of control.

That’s why ambulance officers were voted Australia’s most trusted professionals in our 2008 Reader’s Digest Most Trusted poll – and over the three previous years, too (see the complete results in our July issue, or on our website at www.readersdigest.com.au). We allow them into our our lives, trusting them without question to make life-or-death decisions.

But what makes ambos tick? On an individual level, are they really as trustworthy as everyone thinks? It takes a pretty special person to become a paramedic or an ambulance officer. Most are passionate about what they do: helping people in their time of utmost need, when they are ill.

Dr Joseph Magliaro, a psychologist who works with the Ambulance Service in South Australia, assesses would-be recruits on their emotional resilience, adaptability and capacity to work in a team. “They have to understand that they work in a diverse population and have a sensitivity to that,” he says. “It’s about the ability to articulate themselves with people from all walks of life – and the ability to understand that they are not going to save everybody. Having worked with ambos for 16 years as a doctor of psycho­logy, I see what they do and what they do is an exceptional job.”

Paramedic training varies from state to state, but everywhere it’s getting more advanced. Gone are the days when ambulance officers were little more than stretcher-bearers, whose job was to cart patients to hospital. These days, a paramedic is more likely to have a university degree in health sciences as well as years of hands-on training. Similar to a degree in nursing – in fact many paramedics are former nurses – the training equips paramedics to make snap decisions autonomously. A nurse can always find a doctor to ask: paramedics have just seconds to take action.

Much of a paramedic’s day-to-day routine might involve transporting patients, comforting old people who have mixed up their medicine, or taking people to hospital for X-rays or check-ups. But paramedics are able to do much more than that. Many can administer medication, use a defibrillator, even start intensive-care treatment if the situation requires it.