Colleen Austin, 90, waited three hours for an ambulance in Maryborough

The moment journalist Carlie Walker was forced to make a nest of pillows for her grandmother on the ground following a fall, as they waited for paramedics, the brutal reality of a service under pressure was quite literally brought home.

An ambulance outside Maryborough Hospital on Tuesday night.

My grandmother, Colleen Austin, will turn 91 in a few weeks and unlike many others her age she’s still healthy enough to live in her own home near Maryborough, which is on the same property as my parents’ house.

She has almost daily care from Ozcare and with our visits and the company of her little dog, Beau, she leads a quiet but happy life.

Her mobility was affected by a fall a couple of years ago — she still experiences back and leg pain as a result and getting her out of her home is always difficult as she has to negotiate stairs.

She experiences intense pain trying to lower herself into a car.

On Tuesday night, my grandmother had a fall.

A latch had fallen down on the French doors leading into her bathroom and she bent over to pull it up and open the door.

But after struggling with it, it opened unexpectedly and she fell through the doors, landing awkwardly and cutting her leg and injuring her foot.

Thankfully her phone wasn’t far away and she was able to get to it and call my mum. I was with her and we both dashed to nana’s home, where we could immediately see she needed an ambulance.

I called for help and was assured an ambulance would attend soon.

That was at 6.04pm.

Maryborough's Colleen Austin had a fall in her home on Tuesday night.

It would be almost three hours before an ambulance would arrive.

I don’t write these words to criticise the Queensland Ambulance Service or the help my grandmother received.

I called triple-0 three times in the space of those three hours and each time the person who responded was genuinely caring and concerned about my grandmother.

We were worried about moving her and were advised not to move her.

We created a nest of pillows, but because of the pain in her foot, which she suspected was broken, and her pre-existing injuries, we were concerned we would do more damage if we tried to lift her up.

After two hours of laying on the floor, however, my grandmother was writhing in pain and in tears and my brother lifted her into her seat, where she was able to rest more comfortably for the remainder of the wait.

When the paramedics arrived, we were told they’d come from Hervey Bay.

They could not have been more wonderful. In no way is this a criticism of the care my grandmother received.

But when we arrived at hospital, we could see a number of ambulances waiting to offload patients.

Ramping has been an ongoing concern on the Fraser Coast, although I was later told ramping was not what caused the delay on Tuesday night.

Rather it was a “perfect storm” of medical emergencies that saw nana get bumped down the list.

Of course my family understands that someone in a car crash or facing a life-threatening medical emergency will take priority.

But three hours is a long time to wait when someone you love is bleeding and injured.

My grandmother is not the only person who has faced lengthy delays.

In February 2022, SES worker Tina James fell and broke her leg during Maryborough’s flood emergency.

She had to wait two hours for an ambulance as emergency crews were kept busy with multiple call-outs and manning evacuation centres during Maryborough’s flood crisis.

Tony Hucker, the director of clinical operations from QAS, spoke to me openly about the challenges regularly faced by the service.

An ambulance outside Maryborough Hospital on Tuesday night.

He immediately asked me how my grandmother was and I assured him that she had stitches for her wound overnight and was having her foot X-rayed on Wednesday morning.

I told him that the care nana had received was great — our family was just trying to understand the three-hour wait.

“We’re not happy about that, we never are,” he said.

“We see it happening more and more at the moment, just with the demand pressures.

“In your grandma’s case, it was just a matter of bad timing.

“Now she needed care straight away, there’s no doubt about that, and we have this long tradition, when you call triple-0, we want to come straight away.

“But what’s happening now is because the volume of calls is getting so high, the needs in the community, we’ve got to prioritise.

“Around the time when your grandma had her fall there was a whole lot of other stuff going on as well.

“It was the perfect storm which you don’t want to have happen, there were a whole lot of quite high-priority calls that came in at the time and more importantly soon after, so that delayed the response to your grandma.
“We don’t lose your grandmother as a case, she stays in the system as a priority call, it’s a non-lights and sirens response, but however it was one we’d like to get to right away.”

I told him we understood that more serious emergencies needed to take priority when there were limited resources, and he said paramedics would have wanted to get there “right away”.

Mr Hucker said there was now a clinical hub in Brisbane that has doctors, nurses, paramedics and social workers and it was designed to look after people in a waiting situation.

The treatment Colleen Austin received was terrific, but the wait for an ambulance took three hours.

“They looked at her case and said ‘look, she needs to have an ambulance straight away,’ so they referred it back to acute operations to get the next ambulance going.

“What I think would have been helpful in this case, given the delay really went on, was making continuous calls to her.”

Mr Hucker said the ambulance service experienced “surge periods” which they could not predict where all of a sudden a whole lot of emergency calls came in.

“We had full staffing that night, we did have ambulances at hospitals but they weren’t ramped because they hadn’t exceeded the 30-minute turn around, so ramping wasn’t an issue as far your nana.

“It was really just the high call volume in that period of time she was waiting.

“She would have been at the top of the queue at one time then bumped down, then the top of the queue again then bumped down and frustratingly just keeps happening.”

If the service had 20 crews in the area instead of six, they could better manage those unexpected surges, but it would become unaffordable, Mr Hucker said.

Another way they tried to manage demand was through dynamic deploying, as shown with the Hervey Bay crew who assisted my grandmother.

Colleen Austin with her beloved Beau

But at the end of the day, the service was not comfortable with the idea of an elderly person lying on the floor for an extended period, Mr Hucker said.

He said there was continued pressure in the healthcare system across the board and demand on the health service was going up by 10 per cent every year.

Trying to have a healthier population was part of trying to take the pressure off the health system through prevention, Mr Hucker said.

The Wide Bay Hospital and Health Service was also contacted for comment.

“Our emergency departments in Hervey Bay and Maryborough were moderately busy on Tuesday and there were no significant delays experienced in off-loading patients arriving via QAS,” a spokeswoman said.

As for my grandmother, she’s still sore but now safely home and back with her beloved Beau.

And with a few quick twists of a screwdriver, my brother removed the latch at the bottom of her door, removing the safety hazard for good.

‘How I feel at Christmas’: Snake’s massive feed stuns social media

Frontrunner to replace Katarina Carroll … but does he even want it?

Originally published as Colleen Austin, 90, waited three hours for an ambulance in Maryborough