Paramedics have shared the heartbreaking reality of life on the frontline of an ambulance service under immense pressure.
Erin Holmes was among the ambulance workers on the picket line outside Fazakerley Ambulance Station on Lower Lane on Wednesday in what was their first national strike in more than 30 years. Erin said ambulance wait times are at the highest level she's seen in the seven years she's worked for the North West Ambulance Service, with one patient waiting 28 hours.
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Erin told the ECHO: "This is the daily struggle that we're facing. We're coming into work knowing that we're not going to be able to attend these emergency calls because there's very long delays in the hospitals.
"I've personally spent 12 hours of my 12 hour shift on a corridor the other week so I didn't even see one patient and this isn't the job we've come into.
"When I first started only seven years ago we were seeing eight to ten patients a day. A half an hour to an hour wait might have been a long time to get an ambulance, now the longest I've had is 28 hours of someone waiting for an emergency ambulance.
"Within the last two years, we've just seen the wait times really peak. It's not the job that we've come to do."
With hospitals across the North West suffering from low staffing levels on wards, paramedics like Erin and her colleague Gabrielle Leonard are finding themselves spending their entire shift treating patients on wards instead of responding to emergency calls.
Erin said: "You train as a paramedic to attend to people and see them straight away. We've got students that are training for three years, getting themselves in thousands of pounds worth of debt, and they're not actually learning the job. We'll come in to start our shift and we have to go over to the hospital to relieve the day crew or the night crew, otherwise they wouldn't go home.
"They'd be stuck on that corridor for hours because there isn't enough nursing staff to look after them. We're working as nurses, health care assistants, which we aren't trained to do in a hospital setting - our environment is working on emergency ambulances."
Today's strikes come after eight out of ten of the country's ambulance services declared critical incidents, meaning they had come under "extreme” and sustained pressure. North West Ambulance Service said 600 people were waiting for an ambulance on Saturday, December 17, as it reminded people only to call 999 in an emergency.
Paramedic Gabrielle, 35, told the ECHO: "I'm here today with my colleagues because I want every patient to have the best care. I don't think the NHS is failing, I think the NHS is being failed.
"We all need to stand together to keep the NHS because it's such a precious thing.
"We don't want to be standing here and leaving patients, we want to be out there looking after patients. But when we're on corridors supporting patients because there's not enough nursing staff either, we're doing personal care that we're not trained to do."
"We have a lot of elderly patients and they're the ones we are worried about today. We are very concerned because this is not just today on a strike day, patients are waiting for hours and hours every single day.
"Families are devastated because their 90 year old mothers are on the floor - we don't want that. We want to get there, we want to help them, pick them up and support them, because the longer they're on the floor the sicker they're going to get."
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