Stretched to capacity, NSW Ambulance picks up 450 Covid patients in one day

NSW Ambulance crews picked up 450 Covid patients on Friday alone, pushing the health service to its highest possible emergency response level.

NSW Ambulance crews picked up 450 Covid patients on Friday alone as triple-0 calls are reaching levels seen only on New Year’s Eve.

Friday saw the ambulance network go into status three — the highest possible emergency response level.

“Status three means that we are seeing impacts in our ability to respond to the community,” NSW Ambulance Commissioner Dominic Morgan said.

In this lockdown alone, the ambulance system has responded to 2500 Covid patients as it continues to try and respond to other emergencies.

NSW Ambulance Commissioner Dominic Morgan. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Gaye Gerard

Triple-0 has been inundated with non-emergency calls from requests to be taken to a testing centre, to requests for groceries.

As the ambulance system struggles to keep up with increasing demand and superfluous calls, it is having serious consequences to patients.

Mr Morgan said a 18-year-old in cardiac arrest had a response time of 25 minutes.

“When we receive calls that do not require an ambulance, it has dire consequences,” he said.

“This is devastating, wherever possible we need to be avoiding this.”

NSW Ambulance picked up 450 Covid patients yesterday alone. Picture: Richard Dobson

This comes as NSW recorded 1035 new Covid cases overnight.

Over the past three days, call demand has been as high as New Year’s Eve, usually the busiest day for emergency services.

More than 130 new paramedics have been brought on with another 90 in the coming months to deal with the surge in demand.

Health Minister Brad Hazzard begged the public to stop using ambulances as a taxi service.

“It’s very frustrating at a time where we are getting obviously very substantial numbers of people who need NSW Health assistance, they need to come to hospital but there are quite a number of people using ambulances as taxis,” he said.

“I think that we all need to understand that if you call an ambulance when you really don’t need an ambulance, when it’s not an emergency, someone else who may really need that ambulance could well suffer, could well die.”