Ambulance and Rescue Guernsey is posing the question: Can you afford not to have an ambulance subscription ?
It costs £71 per year for an adult, or £50 for a pension, and £33 for a child.
For that you are covered for five emergency and 10 non emergency patient transfers as well as five Flying Christine III journeys.
Around 7,000 people have a subscription but many won’t use them from one year to the next. Ambulance and Rescue says it still makes sense to take out a subscription though, because of the high cost of paying for an ambulance if you’re not covered.
Costs
If you were to need five emergency and 10 non emergency ambulance trips, and five journeys on the Flying Christine in one year, it would cost you around £15,000.
Some or all of those trips might be covered by an insurance policy if you have one but terms vary so you might still need to pay for the calls out when needed.
If you don’t have any insurance or an ambulance subscription it will cost you dearly if you need help from the Ambulance and Rescue Service.
While a non-emergency patient transfer will cost from £95, an emergency ambulance call out will cost £585.
If you’re in Herm and need transferring back to Guernsey the price rises to £647 for the use of the marine ambulance.
That price rises even further if the Flying Christine III has to go to Sark, with a £2,420 charge.
The charges are even higher for visitors to the Bailiwick, and there are other charges to consider too if hospital treatment is needed.
Subscription
“A subscription is peace of mind, because what is unpredictable is when you’re going to have an accident or when you might have a medical emergency, that’s very unpredictable,” said Mark Mapp, Chief Ambulance Officer.
“What is predictable is the cost of that.
“What the subscription scheme does, in a nutshell, for £71 a year or £6 a month, it gives that person and their family peace of mind. Because what we don’t want is the trauma of the accident or medical emergency and then the trauma of a big bill, £585, come through the letterbox, and we see it too often.”
Mr Mapp said ambulance crews too often arrive at call outs to meet a patient asking how much it’s going to cost them. A subscription can remove that element of worry and trauma from the medical incident, he said.
“I have actually been a paramedic and I have been out to those calls. We’re focused on caring for people, and that’s what we need to do, to help them feel better and fix them, with all the advanced stuff we do now, but quite often the person is even more distressed because they ask how much it’s going to cost, and that’s really challenging.
“We need to concentrate on the care we give them, and not really talk about how much it’s going to cost. And that’s why this subscription scheme was introduced. It is that peace of mind, not only to you, but your family, because often you can be really seriously unwell, and it’s not your first thought. It’s not your problem necessarily. It might be your family’s concern, your family’s worry, when all these medical bills start coming in. So the subscription is peace of mind, but it is also about equality, you know, and making sure everyone in our community can feel they can phone 909 and contact the ambulance service when they need it.
“We don’t want anyone to feel that they can’t afford to do that, and so we always say you must dial 999 if it’s needed, and then, let’s hope you’ve got a subscription. Because one in four people that we attend haven’t got a subscription, and we want to increase that, but people need to call 999 if they need to.”
Mr Mapp says the monthly cost of an adult’s subscription is similar to the Netflix subscription charge. He hopes people will see their ambulance cover as more important.
“One of the messages we really want to get across is that you can sign up at the ambulance station or at Guernsey Post. You can sign up for it annually and pay it one off but you can do a direct debit at £6 a month, you never have to worry about it again. It will keep going until you phone us and tell us to stop it.
“In my experience, people have in the past had the bill come through and they think their covered but they’ve forgotten.
“It’s always around Christmas but it’s not always at the forefront of the mind. I know people that have been a subscriber for 50 years or 40 years, and they’ve missed it because their wife was sick that Christmas period and didn’t come in and do it. So if you get on a direct debit, you’d never have to worry about it any further. And it is the price of Netflix. And it’s that peace of mind.”
Ambulance and Rescue Guernsey
Guernsey’s Ambulance and Rescue Service responds to around 10,000 call outs per year.
That includes around 7,000 emergencies and 3,000 planned patient transfers.
The service is operated by St John on behalf of the States of Guernsey through a grant from the Committee for Health and Social Care.
That grant covers about half of the running costs of the ambulance service, with the other half covered by ambulance subscriptions, fundraising and donations, and fees charged to patients when the service is called out.
The ambulance service has been operated by St John since 1936 and Mr Mapp thinks a subscription charge has been around for almost that entire time.
“To my knowledge, the way in which our revenue is generated hasn’t changed in 89 years,” he said.
“I think we have got such a strong brand in our community,” he added. “St John has been here forever. We were here through the war, through covid, we’re always here to serve the community in people’s sometimes darkest hour.
“We’re always here, and I think that brand means we get the support from the community and we are able to do other things like our volunteering, able to offer our Community First Responder Scheme, our marine ambulance, it’s all because the public trust us, and that is one of our values – trust.”
Taking out a subscription
To join the subscription scheme, visit ambulance.gg/charges-subscriptions, or visit a Guernsey Post branch.
Anyone with an existing direct debit for their annual ambulance subscription will have theirs automatically renewed.
Anyone who has previously paid their subscription annually will be sent a reminder.