About Us

Wellington Free Ambulance are committed to ensuring the safety of our staff, patients and community.

During our response to COVID-19, we are taking a number of precautions to ensure staff safety. We know our community want to ensure we’re keeping our teams safe too, so let us share with you how we’re keeping our staff and their families’ safe and well:

• We have talked with all our staff to understand health, family and childcare needs and have been able to re-roster, re-deploy or support staff with these challenges.
  
  
• Providing our staff with appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) and guidance on when to use it, including face masks, eye protection, face shields, gloves and gowns. PPE minimizes the risk to ensure infection control for our staff, patients and community.
  
  
• Disinfection and decontamination procedures for vehicles across our stations.
  
  
• Equipment and stores continue to be well managed to ensure there are enough of the right supplies and equipment to operate our service. 
  
  
• We are providing support to staff with accommodation challenges, including alternative accommodation options for short term isolation needs or longer terms protection from their families and households.
  
  
• We continue to encourage our community to call Healthline should they feel unwell and be experiencing flu like symptoms.
  
  
• There are additional screening tools used by our 111 emergency medical call takers during the telephone triage process to ensure we are capturing whether anyone in the callers household has flu like symptoms.

To understand what help staff need from us, we are communicating with them regulary. Navigating any welfare issues and ensuring staff with child care challenges are rostered appropriately to help with this. Those in high risk categories due to health concerns can choose to be redeployed to other areas of the organisation.

Providing free flu immunisations early, delivering fruit baskets to all stations and ensuring all staff and volunteers continue to have access to our employee assistance programme, helps maintain their wellbeing.

We are talking with our staff daily, understanding concerns they may have and ensuring we are doing everything we can to keep them safe and well.

Whilst we understand it’s an unsettling time with the impacts of COVID-19 far reaching, Wellington Free Ambulance are taking every effort to keep our community safe. Our organisation continues to operate to be here for all those who need us.

Stay safe, keep informed and act with kindness. Take care Wellington and Wairarapa.