Australians emigrating to London to fill paramedic vacancies

More than 150 qualified paramedics from Australia have moved to London and begun work as a result of the high number of vacancies in the position in the English capital.

Sydney’s Channel 7 station declared that it was “Aussies to the Rescue” in its headline on Monday 26 January, the day the works officially started their new jobs, in what appeared to be a public mocking of the UK for its inability to provide its people with the requisite number of medially-trained ambulance workers
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London Ambulance Service has taken on 175 Australians and New Zealanders in total to fill the gaps in its rosters. The organisation will launch recruitment drives in Sydney and Melbourne in March as it aims to hire a further 280 candidates interested in emigrating to the UK.

After completing a three-week course to bring themselves up to scratch with the system in Britain, the first Australians began their new jobs on Monday.
Aussie paramedic Mitchell Hand noted that people were all made the same so it didn’t matter where in the world you worked. He admitted, however, that he wasn’t exactly sure what to expect and said the climate could be a shock, but insisted he was ready for his new life in London.

Meanwhile, London Ambulance Service’s Jason Killens explained that they could have looked to the US or Canada, but said Australia appealed because so many universities were producing graduates. He pointed out that the education, training and health model were so similar to that of the UK that it made perfect sense to recruit from that part of the world.