STAFF shortages and a lack of resources are hampering the delivery of two of the Island’s emergency services, new reports have found.
Independent reviews of the Jersey Fire and Rescue Service and the Jersey Ambulance Service have been published today, revealing that the fire service would struggle to deal with a ‘major incident’.
While both reports commended the current services for their dedication and quality of staff, they expressed concerns over the ability to continue to provide such quality with limited personnel and resources.
A report published on the Island’s fire service revealed that staff were having to spread themselves ‘very thinly’ in order to ‘maintain competence’ in areas across the service.
‘At the moment, the lack of capacity means that we heard the service cannot assure itself, and others, that it can prevent, or deal with, a major incident, or simultaneous incidents, nor protect its firefighters or residents if such an incident were to occur,’ they said.
‘It has been hard to recruit officers from the UK to improve capacity, even on a secondment basis, because of the difference in cost of living between much of England and Jersey,’ they added.
The report highlighted the fact there was a business case in place for an increase in funding for the service. However, it expressed concern that this extra funding was to be used for mostly ‘on-call firefighters’.
‘In the opinion of the peer team, this business case does not go far enough. The peer team recommend that there is an increase in whole-time fire fighters,’ they said.
‘This carries with it inherent risks, for example: the location of the fire stations is not conducive to recruitment of on-call firefighters; and on-call firefighters are difficult to train and maintain competence because of their limited availability,’ they added.
One of the recommendations of the report is to explore the development of the St Helier fire service site ‘to include not just a new fire and ambulance station and headquarters, but also accommodation.’
‘This would allow the service to consider different operating models, such as close proximity crewing or similar, to help maintain cover. It could also allow the service to explore secondments from the UK to help with capacity. Opportunities could exist to develop commercial opportunities through this development, for example, holiday lets,’ they said.
The review of the ambulance service found that better inter-department links were needed between Justice and Home Affairs and Health and Community Services.
The report added that it was ‘astounded’ that there is no mention of the role and contribution of the ambulance service within the Jersey Care Model.
They continued: ‘A review of capacity in the ambulance service has revealed that there are growing signs that the service no longer has the ability to meet its present demand, as evidenced by longer response times, a reliance on overtime and increasing instances of being unable to respond to incidents without calling on managerial and other resources as a last resort.
‘The service is currently inadequately funded due to a combination of issues including a lack of core capacity leading to a necessity to use more agency staff and overtime and some historic transitional issues as budgets were transferred from HCS to JHA leading to a shortfall in the funding transferred.’
