I’m sorry mate you are a terrible first aider and you should reconsider your approach before someone dies on your watch. As an EMT, loss of consciousness is absolutely something that warrants clinical assessment by a healthcare professional.

As a first aider you should understand the chain of survival, one of which is “early access to advanced care”. Delaying calling the ambulance completely violated that training. You should understand that the protocol DRSABCD has “send for help” after any response less than “alert” is identified. Your anecdote already shows you cannot follow the protocol and are not acting within your training. It also doesn’t say “go back and cancel the ambulance if they regain consciousness”. The training is simply “put them in the recovery position” which implies “and wait for ambulance to arrive”.

The reason it is taught that way is, you are not a doctor qualified to diagnose whether someone’s complex condition is an emergency or not. The absolutely worse thing you can do is make the wrong choice and delay necessary care. The best case is the paramedics come, assesses the patient, and decided they don’t need to go to hospital and they go on their merry way (at no cost to the patient). So for you, you always make the worst case scenario.

It’s not your responsibility as a first aider to consider the strain on the ambulance or the financial outcome to the patient. Your duty of care is to the medical outcome of your patient, nothing else.

No it’s not. People don’t generally lose consciousness, so even if they regain it, they should still be escalated to advanced care to be clinically assessed.

The “Non-Emergency” part of NEPTs might have something to do with that. The drivers are not paramedics. They have a first aid certificate at best.

There’s something not right about the article. It’s talking about non-emergency patient transport but referring to a bus crash with trauma patients. Whatever their bosses told them, the NEPT interviewed were not going anywhere near that incident since they’re not paramedics and are not trained to provide clinical assistance, so their shift with Victoria Ambulance is completely unrelated to the incident.

And the quote referred to how Nick felt gutted about transporting patients to doctors appointments like it’s a waste of resource. That’s literally the point of NEPT. The staff are not paramedics and the vehicle are not ambulances. The NEPT at best would’ve been involved with transporting uninjured children at the incident, which Victoria Ambulance had already arranged with a bus (which is far better for traceability and logistics than a dozen NEPT being called).

The general point of private operators not meeting their contractual obligations is fair. The government just needs to enforce its contract better and apply penalties if they don’t provide the number of staff they’re obligated to.