For 20 years, Sandra Romero works as an intermediate level paramedic in the Red Cross national headquarters. A day it can attend to up to eight cases, which is why, on occasions, it is exposed to risk situations.
“I have been a Red Cross volunteer since 2003 and I am a paramedic in private services in Mexico City, also since that date,” she said in an interview with La Verdad Nacional.
under the World Red Cross Day and the Red Crescent, which is commemorated this May 8Sandra assures that as paramedics they must be prepared at all times.
“Our city is very violent, very intense and very massive of people. At the Red Cross, anything can happen to you; If you attend to the Alameda area, you can attend to all the violence in the Historic Center and that has its implications, such as attending to kidnappings,” he stated.
Sandra remembers that she has faced different experiences involving violence such as in 2015, when he provided medical attention to a person who was shot, an alleged member of the organized crime.
“The violence in Ecatepec has touched me; On some occasion we were driving along Av. Central and organized crime people took a patient out of the ambulance. This type of thing happens to all of us and we must have the reflexes to decide in which case you do not have to approach it, even if there is a life at risk ”, he affirmed.
He explained that his colleagues sent an alert to the ambulance where he worked to attend a call from a person injured with a firearm.
“They call you to the service and we were attending to a shot on board without knowing what the circumstance was. They began to persecute us and they approached us with different cars and we had to do everything they told us to do and they took it away, because we had to look after our lives at that moment,” Sandra said.
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job insecurity
Sandra Romero considers that being a paramedic is a “very nice profession” because he likes to help people; however, he acknowledges that being a technical career “it’s already devalued” in academic, professional and financial.
“It is common for the ambulance staff to be precarious at a general level with low wages and very long hours that can last 12 hours with a day off or 24-by-24-hour shifts,” he told La Verdad Noticias.
In the case of the Red Cross, Sandra ensures that the days are 8 hours; however, “the salary is very low” and he considers that it is difficult to find opportunities with higher salaries.
After the recognition of the profession as Higher University Technicianby the Ministry of Public Education (SEP)you can talk about a “academic regularization”.
“There is a need for these types of issues that allow the profession to be more recognized, because the UNAM has also offered first-level technical courses, but they do not have continuity,” he stressed.
He considers that professional disparity generates, in the workplace, a precariousness due to the lack of recognition of the institutions educational and labor.
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