By VANESSA CHIRCOP
SERIOUSLY ill people are being forced to idly wait more than 1000 hours per month in ambulances parked at hospitals in Melbourne’s West.
Documents obtained under Freedom of Information reveal that ambulance ‘ramping’ times are on the increase with 1021 hours spent ramping across Footscray’s Western Hospital, Sunshine Hospital and Werribee Mercy Hospital in just nine months to March this year.
Western Hospital took the cake, with paramedics spending 541 hours a month waiting to transfer patients into the hospital’s care – the highest ramping times in the West and sixth highest in the State.
Paramedics at Sunshine Hospital were forced to wait 380 hours a month, up from 314 hours a month in 2010-11 and 242 hours a month in 2009-10.
While paramedics at Werribee Mercy were forced to wait 100 hours a month, up from 83 hours a month in 2010-11 and 70 hours a month in 2009-10.
A Western Metropolitan paramedic, who did not wish to be named, said they could spend anywhere between one to four hours queued up at a hospital.
“We’re told you’re just going to have to wait – we don’t have a bed.”
The paramedic said the issue was affecting ambulance response times.
“If you’ve got five crews queued up at a hospital, that’s five crews that can’t respond to a job,” he said.
“They (the State Government) need to take seriously the issue of hospital ramping, that it’s not just a small problem, it’s a major problem that’s having a massive detrimental effect on our ability to respond to cases.”
Member for Williamstown and Opposition Parliamentary Secretary for Health, Wade Noonan, said the figures were particularly alarming especially when compared with figures from previous years.
Ambulance Employees Australia State Secretary Steve McGhie described the ramping figures as “madness”.
“When you bring it down to the personal and professional issues for paramedics, it’s tiring, it’s fatiguing, it’s frustrating, it lengthens their daily shift by several hours and it can become quite dangerous,” he said.
“From the patient’s point of view, it’s a delay in hospital intervention of that patient’s treatment regime.”
Mr McGhie said if trends continue there will be a major crisis in the future.
Minister for Health David Davis said the government is investing $151 million to recruit 340 additional ambulance staff, including 210 paramedics in regional Victoria with 49 in the health regions.
“The Auditor General in October 2010 found that Ambulance Victoria had declining performance over the previous six years both operationally and financially under Labor,” Mr Davis said.
“Labor mismanaged ambulance services over the previous 11 years, including the merger of three previous ambulance services and it will take time to turn around Labor’s mismanagement.”
