Steve Price: Why Victoria’s ambulance crisis sits firmly at the feet of Premier Dan Andrews

After seeing a sick mate wait an hour for paramedics, Steve Price is over Dan Andrews’ excuses for the state’s stressed ambulance system and says the Premier needs to be accountable.

A paramedic revealed to Steve Price she often cried on her way to work and way home. Picture: Getty Images

Unless you are having a heart attack or a stroke, or maybe badly injured in a car accident, don’t expect to get an ambulance in Melbourne in a hurry in 2022.

Bluntly, you need to be near death to get a rapid response in this state.

On Tuesday night Victoria’s ambulance service was again placed on operational code orange, one level down from a disaster setting of red.

At one stage, according to Ambulance Victoria, only eight per cent of the fleet was available to respond to call outs and even its own boss concedes it happens most weeks.

On this policy failure alone, the Daniel Andrews led Victorian Labor government deserves to be thrown out of office.

Coincidentally, on the very same day this week, I was involved in an ambulance call out to the Mornington Peninsula, where of course Premier Andrews injured his back in March last year.

His ambulance arrived, according to official records released on his return to work in 2021, in just 14 minutes. On Tuesday - with real fears about the health of a friend we were playing golf with - the paramedics took an hourto arrive.

Shaken by the sudden collapse of our friend and knowing he had a number of existing health issues, including a heart pacemaker and a condition known as transient ischaemic attack, which presents as a brief stroke, we called triple-0.

TIA is explained medically as the potential sign of a future stroke and we feared he could be having just that – a stroke.

The paramedic crew had been alerted to his symptoms by the dispatch but the system that afternoon and into the night was under so much stress we waited an hour.

We were at the Rosebud Country Club golf course at the end of the Peninsula Link extension on Boneo Rd. Just a five-minute drive away is the Rosebud Hospital with its own emergency department.

It’s time people stopped giving the Andrews government a free pass on its public health policy failures says Steve Price. Picture: David Crosling

Closer still is the Mica 12 Ambulance Station on Murray-Anderson Rd in Rosebud. There is another ambulance based in Sorrento, opposite the footy ground.

The crew, which arrived almost exactly an hour after our emergency call, had been sent from Seaford, a trip of 42km.

I can only presume that the resources based in Rosebud itself and up the road in Sorrento were involved in other emergencies or stuck on a ramp at the Frankston Hospital unable to release a patient because of a lack of beds.

Nobody expects an ambulance to be based on each street corner but how can it be possible that on a Tuesday late afternoon in an area with an ageing population that you can’t get better response times than an hour?

It’s time people stopped giving the Andrews government a free pass on this sort of failure of public health policy. Andrews has been Premier for the last seven-and-a-half years and before that he was Health Minister under John Brumby for three years.

He needs to own this critical care disaster and stop blaming Canberra and the federal government, as he loves to do. An ambulance didn’t have to come more than 40km and take an hour to get to my friend because of Canberra.

It’s his fault.

One of the two professional paramedics who eventually arrived shouldn’t — as one of them told me happened, while administering treatment — break down in tears each day on the way to her shift and on the way home.

It’s Dan’s fault.

The paramedics confessed the system was at breaking point and so were they, dangerously stretched and anxious, forced to confront the scene that awaited them at Rosebud an hour after the call.

My mate had collapsed in a golf cart, unable to walk or at first even take steps into the clubhouse. He had vomited and was glassy-eyed and unable to focus or even explain what was happening.

We thought it was a heart attack or stroke at worst, and the general manager of the course who had managed health emergencies and a fatality there before, was just as worried.

As the temperature dropped, we covered him in towels and jackets, and were tempted to take him to emergency in one of our vehicles but unwilling to take the risk.

In the end tests administered by the paramedics gave my mate, who is aged 75 and a well- known Victorian, the all clear and he dodged a bullet.

He was one of the lucky ones, with multiple deaths already put down to delayed ambulance arrival times including the sad story of a 14-year-old asthmatic Pakenham schoolgirl back in April.

Lydia Anseline’s Mum called triple-0 at 1.07am, an ambulance arrived at 1.41am but the little girl had died. Her last words were “dad, I love you” and her father Bernard says: “If the system wasn’t under so much pressure, Lydia would still be alive.”

He lives four minutes away from the ambulance station and now wishes he had driven her to hospital himself.

This case was so unlike the Premier’s experience back in 2021 where he got a swift transfer from a Sorrento holiday house to Peninsula Private emergency, all in under an hour.

If my mate had tragically been having a heart attack or a stroke our collision with Daniel Andrews’ health system would have been even more upsetting and could have been fatal.

As it is, I now know if my life is in the balance - hanging on the arrival of an emergency ambulance - I am taking one massive risk and might not make it.

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