Waiting up to 10 hours: Desperate ambos’ plea on ramping epidemic

Paramedics are increasingly frustrated by the amount of time they’re spending ramped at hospitals rather than out on the road.

Paramedics are increasingly frustrated by the amount of time they’re spending ramped at hospitals rather than out on the road doing the job they were trained for, with a key union boss calling for the government to put initiatives “on steroids”.

The comments from the United Workers’ Union comes as newly released data shows in the most dire instances ambulances are spending nearly 10 hours, particularly at hospitals on the southeast, frozen in place unable to offload patients.

Two people — Wayne Irving and Cath Groom — tragically lost their lives in separate instances involving ramping and an ambulance failing to turn up in the last week.

UWU national ambulance co-ordinator Fiona Scalon said paramedics were impacted and frustrated by their inability to get off a hospital ramp to get to patients in need of help, with hundreds of work hours lost each day.

Ms Scalon said ramping was happening across the country and underlined it was a complex problem in need of complex solutions.

“Anything that they’re (the government) doing, they need to put it on steroids … really to make any real difference,” she said.

It comes as new ambulance ramping data, released to the Opposition through a question notice, revealed the longest periods paramedics waited to offload patients between May and September were between eight hours and 16 minutes and nine hours and 54 minutes.

Public hospitals at Redlands, Ipswich, and Logan were among the facilities that logged the worst ambulance ramping.

At Ipswich Hospital in June one ambulance waited nine hours and 54 minutes to offload a patient.

Opposition health spokeswoman Ros Bates said ambulance ramping had very real consequences and were costing Queenslanders their lives.

“Paramedics didn’t study to spend an entire shift at the end of an ambulance ramp, unable to get to urgent calls for help,” she said.

Health Minister Shannon Fentiman, in response to a question on notice, said the QAS was the busiest in the nation, responding to 1.2 million incidents a year, and that the median waiting time at emergency was 15 minutes.