Andrews government fails on ambulance responses

In an unashamedly high-spending, big-taxing state with a vast public sector, it is deplorable that at least 33 Victorians died after waiting too long for ambulances between December 2020 and May 2022. The state’s Inspector-General for Emergency Management, Tony Pearce, included that finding in his review of Victoria’s emergency ambulance call answer performance. Delays have damaged the public’s confidence in the system and placed the community at risk, the IGEM found: “In late 2021, the level of calls grew to a point where ESTA (Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority) was taking longer than the five-second target time to answer most emergency calls – at times more than 10 minutes.’’ One caller waited 76 minutes in January this year. “Over the six months from October 2021 to March 2022, ESTA reported the lowest emergency ambulance call answer performance in its history,” the report noted.

The Andrews government has had the report since early August but it chose to release it, on short notice, on Saturday morning. Most Victorians were preoccupied with the AFL finals series and other weekend activities, most political reporters were not at work and Saturday television news ratings are low. All governments choose their times to “take out the trash’’ – late Friday afternoon is also popular – but the life-and-death seriousness of this issue makes the cynicism of the government’s approach offensive to the public.

Premier Daniel Andrews was otherwise engaged so the task on Saturday morning fell to Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes. Ms Symes was keen to blame the failures on the pandemic. The onset of the pandemic, the report noted, put all parts of Victoria’s health system under strain. “ESTA faced challenges in managing record-breaking volumes of emergency calls, particularly for ambulance events,’’ it said.

That is far from the whole story, however. In June, research in the Medical Journal of Australia found ambulance ramping in Victoria might have been associated with about 70 preventable deaths in patients with chest pain in 2018. The risk of death or ambulance reattendance for patients with chest pain increased when offload time at emergency departments exceeded 17 minutes, it found, which applied in 70 per cent of cases transported to Victorian emergency departments in 2018.

Two days before the federal election in May, the Andrews government released former police commissioner Graham Ashton’s report into how and why the state’s emergency triple-0 call service had also failed the public. The government sat on that report for two months.

The latest Newspoll shows Mr Andrews on track for re-election in November, but political sensitivities over emergency services are acute. Ambulance ramping and failures in the health system in South Australia are the reason the otherwise competent government of Liberal premier Steven Marshall lost office in March.

In the IGEM report, which the Andrews government has promised to implement in full, Mr Pearce called for a sustainable funding model for ESTA to be put in place as soon as possible. Work to devise such a model had been ongoing between several departments and agencies – Justice and Community Safety, Treasury and Finance, Emergency Management Victoria and ESTA – for more than 10 years. The Andrews government had been aware of ESTA’s “precarious financial position” as early as 2015, through an auditor-general’s report, he said. The present model did “not provide adequate funding to cover ESTA’s costs due to demand growth and increases in wages under industrial agreements”. If the Victorian opposition is up to the task, it has been handed a potent election issue.