News

The Victorian Ambulance Union Incorporated (VAU) today had to our North Melbourne offices higher ups in NEPT from St John Ambulance (St John) and National Patient Transport (NPT). The meeting focused on improving protections for Non-Emergency Patient Transport (NEPT) workers from occupational violence and aggression, with particular attention to information sharing, risk identification, reporting, and collaborative advocacy between ambulance services, employers, unions, WorkSafe, police and healthcare providers.

What has been identified?

As members will be aware significant gaps in information sharing exists between services, inclusive of between Police, hospitals and Ambulance Victoria, TZV and NEPT. Critical risk information is often siloed, meaning crews attend high risk patients without being aware of previous safety incidents or risks.
This is especially prevalent in NEPT where there is no access to Ambulance Victoria LOI or POI information. Information can often be out of date or unreliable.
In recent weeks, the VAU have met with Government, AV, DHS, TZV and VicPol to advocate for changes to legislation but more importantly preventative measures that reduce the risk of harm to the ambulance workforce including NEPT.
The VAU presented information to St John and NPT regarding options for a potential database of LOI/SPPT information that can be shared with NEPT. This enables addresses and names to be searched and keeps a record of safety risks as well as the ability to be updated by providers with the most current information. The finer details of this programme are still to be worked out but the VAU, St John and NPT will advocate together for its usage in NEPT.

What’s Really Important?

All Parties were in strong agreement that hazards and incidents are underreported, especially ‘near misses. Data creates evidence for change. The VAU expressed members often report a mistrust or dissatisfaction with reporting systems and ‘nothing will happen/be fixed’. St John and NPT expressed they do look at and collate this data and will reconfirm this to employees. They also have obligations under the OH&S Act to review the reports, track trends and review controls to reduce or eliminate the risks to safety of their workforce.
Hazards exist in areas which may seem like they are not worth reporting, such as:

• Aggressive swearing patient without an actual element of violence occurring
• Sexual harassment in the way of comments or sexual violence in the way where a patient may touch you in a manner intended to be sexual
• Aggression from patients where ‘it may be expected’ though is a fault of their clinical diagnosis rather than behavioural e.g. dementia or neurodivergence

What’s Next?

The meeting highlighted widespread concern that NEPT workers are frequently exposed to occupational violence without access to the same risk intelligence available to other agencies. There was strong agreement that improved information sharing, better reporting, targeted training, and coordinated advocacy are required to strengthen worker safety across the sector.

The parties agreed that access to safety is fundamentally and OH&S issue. We discussed:

• The potential legal obligations of organisations NEPT providers contract to, to provide relevant risk information.
• Using OH&S legislation to leverage where risk information is not shared
• Involving WorkSafe in future discussions and advocacy efforts.
• Improving training around scene safety awareness, de-escalation skills and managing and communicating when aggressive behaviour begins (what is your employers training on this like? Get HSRs and the VAU involved in these chats)
• Improved workflows around job refusal and safety escalation and the NEPT workforce confidence that they can do this without fear of reprisal.

We know the current systems are deeply flawed and leave frontline staff unnecessarily vulnerable to OV. We have many passionate, driven and highly skilled members driving initiates that will have real impacts to improving data sharing and safety.

In solidarity