Ambulance workers in Wales have voted to strike again days after their first day of industrial action. Unite said that workers including paramedics, EMTs and emergency call handling staff voted by 88% to strike and will announce dates for action in the new year.
It means that around 1,000 Welsh Ambulance Service (WAS) members could take part strike, along with more than 1,600 ambulance workers and Unite members in England. It comes as the union claims that where they once saw 10 patients a day, often they can now deal with only one per shift, spending hours and even whole days at a time sitting outside A&E with patients waiting to be seen.
They are calling for the Welsh Government to put a better pay deal on the table to solve the crisis with recruitment and retention issues that the union says is "crippling" the ambulance service. It added that Unite members in the Welsh Ambulance Service claim many Red and Amber calls, the most serious and life threatening of categories, are not being responded to quickly enough and sometimes not at all.
