Tuesday, 21 February 2023

Benambra electorate ambulance services

Bill TILLEY (Benambra) (19:17): (49) I wish to raise a matter for the attention of the Minister for Ambulance Services, and the action I seek is for the minister to explain what is planned to address the systemic chronic failure of ambulance services to deliver benchmark response times to the Indigo and Towong shires.

Towong is the worst for ambulance response times in the whole state of Victoria. Indigo bounces around a bit, but with the latest data trotted out – on a Friday at the end of a sitting week – it sits at about sixth worst in the state. Let me throw you some numbers: 30 minutes and 9 seconds – that is the average wait time for a life-threatening medical emergency in the Towong shire, the average, the worst in the state; 22.7 – that is the percentage of people in Towong with life-threatening medical emergencies who saw the flashing lights of an ambulance arrive on time in the last three months of 2022. What about these: 172 – that is the number of people with a life-threatening emergency who did not get an ambulance within 15 minutes in Indigo shire. That is a 16 per cent increase in the average wait time for the lights and sirens, an ambulance, in Indigo in the 12 months from late 2021 to late 2022. Now, I am on a roll with all these figures and so forth, so let us keep going with the actuarial work.

Between 2015 and 2022 Indigo shire grew by almost 8 per cent. The average number of ambulance call-outs to code 1 emergencies, however, jumped from 161 to 202.6. That is almost 26 per cent. What can Ambulance Victoria tell us about that? Why has this happened? I have spoken with many paramedics at the front line who say one of the major roadblocks is when the ambulance gets to hospital. They sit outside emergency with their patient until a bed is available; it can take hours. Albury-Wodonga Health is a cross-border health service with two campuses. When the Wodonga ambulance is sitting at the Albury Base Hospital or Wodonga Hospital, the next call-out is to the paramedics at Beechworth, taking that service out of Indigo shire. The next after that is Tallangatta, leaving Towong short. Until there are enough beds in our hospital system it is hard to see this pattern changing.

There are solutions out there. Turning Beechworth into a 24-hour station could at least help Indigo shire. I understand the current roster is two paramedics on day shift and on call between 6 am and 8 am. An additional seven paramedics would do the trick. I also think the time is right to give the north-east its own helicopter emergency medical service, not one out of Bendigo, Traralgon, Warrnambool or Essendon but one based in Albury-Wodonga. The AgustaWestland AW139 twin-engine helicopters are for life-threatening emergencies, trauma and paediatric cases, and it is time we had our own service – just like the one we lost to south-west coast in a shadowy horsetrading deal back in 2009.