Mr Brandon Reid1
1St John WA, Perth, Australia
Biography:
Brandon is a District Operations Manager with the Rural and Remote Ambulance Operations Team. In 2025, he has reached 10 years’ service with St John WA. Over the last 4 years he has worked throughout regional and remote Western Australia in a range of frontline ambulance and strategic roles.
Abstract:
Situation
In 2023, we identified an increase demand on our remote Community Paramedic team. The remoteness of the position and staff residing in their response catchment, created an ethical dilemma in staff balancing time away from work and supporting their local community. It was identified that this demand increased our psychosocial risk for the cohort, calling for increased respite, mentoring support, and professional collaboration.
Task
The task, in one the one of the world’s largest rural and remote areas, was to develop and pilot a sustainable solution that afforded operational ambulance cover and peer support across 29 different regional locations, with limited funding and resourcing.
Action
We created and piloted the Operational Support Community Paramedic role. A rotating deployable response clinician.
Result
Beyond providing regional teams an opportunity to have peer support and access respite, we found a range of operational benefits. Including increased education opportunities, compliance and operational readiness.
Over the 11-month trial period,15 deployments provided critical respite,10 urgent roster vacancies we’re fulfilled, 5 new clinicians were provided mentoring, and 118 calls had an Ambulance Paramedic attend that otherwise would have had BLS scope attended.
The position remains supported, currently providing Family and Domestic Violence education across regional Western Australia, having attended 53 locations and educating 681 volunteers as of December 2025, whilst still fulfilling it’s critical mission of supporting our remote clinicians.