Regional Victoria
Regional ambulance services are in crisis
Regional Victorians are paying the price for years of under-funding of our ambulance services.
It’s time to fix this — all Victorians deserve a first class ambulance service.
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Waiting longer than ever
If you have a cardiac arrest, you need a paramedic inside eight minutes to avoid brain injury or death.
In regional Victoria, you may have to wait a lot longer than that.
In fact, response times for one in every ten emergency cases is 25 minutes or more. And over the last 6 years emergency response times have grown longer and longer.
The State Government’s solution is to simply move the goal posts. Its benchmark has gone from 10 minutes to 15 minutes — and we’re not even meeting that.
We need Premier Brumby to commit to faster ambulance response times, not weaker targets.
Regional Victoria is missing out
Understaffed regional ambulance branches are under enormous pressure.
Many branches have passed the official threshold for receiving extra staffing but have been told to make do.
Paramedics say many towns are often left without a local paramedic for many hours because of understaffing.
Many paramedics are also doing dangerously high levels of overtime because they are worried about leaving their towns uncovered.
These towns and cities are paying the price for chronic under-funding of regional Victoria.
Frontline fatigue
Paramedic workload has increased up to four times as fast as staff numbers in recent years. Our ambos can’t cope.
Fatigue has reached dangerously high levels. A recent survey of ambos found that 87 percent say it affects their judgement at work. This is a risk to patients, the public and our ambos.
The survey also found:
- 75% of paramedics say they are making errors because of fatigue
- 73% say fatigue is caused by their workload during their shift
- 27% have a diagnosed medical problem linked to work-related fatigue.
- 52% say it affects their relationship with their children.
Many ambos say they’ve been so exhausted they’ve fallen asleep driving. Others have made errors with patient treatment and medication.
We urgently need more ambos. This will help us reduce these dangerously high levels of fatigue.
Stand with our ambos! Click now to help our ambos win a better safer ambulance service.
