Ambulance waiting times worsen as Victoria’s health system continues to buckle

Ambulance response times worsened across Victoria during the December quarter as paramedics responded to the highest number of callouts on record.

Health data released on Friday by the Victorian Agency for Health Information showed it took ambulances an average of 9.53 minutes to arrive at life-threatening incidents in the last quarter of 2022, up from 9.03 minutes from the same time in 2021.

Ambulance waiting times have increased as Ambulance Victoria experiences record demand.Credit: Fairfax Media

It also took paramedics longer to get to high-priority, code-one incidents with an average response time of 13.08 minutes compared with 12.07 minutes a year earlier.

Ambulance Victoria executive director of clinical operations Anthony Carlyon said COVID-19 continued to place a massive strain on the health system, resulting in soaring demand, sicker patients, and increased staff furloughing.

“October to December was the busiest quarter in Ambulance Victoria’s history, with paramedics called to a record 100,234 Code 1 cases,” Carlyon said.

“That’s 9.7 per cent or 8837 more ‘lights and sirens’ cases compared to same time in 2021 and a huge 35.8 per cent increase from 73,797 Code 1 cases just five years ago.”

Reduced access to primary care within communities, including GPs, added further strain to a healthcare system already under pressure, he said.

“From October to December, 41,440 callers to triple zero did not need an emergency ambulance and were instead connected by paramedics and nurses in our secondary triage team to more appropriate care,” Carlyon said.

Victoria’s hospitals are not faring much better, as the sickest patients continue to wait for treatment.

Category 1 patients had to wait an average of 12 days before receiving treatment, compared to 11 days in the previous quarter and 10 days at the beginning of 2022.

However, small inroads are being made on Category 2 and Category 3 waiting times.

Category 2 patients – those requiring semi-urgent care – waited for an average of 77 days, reduced by six days since last quarter, although not quite meeting levels reached in the October-December 2021 quarter, when patients were waiting only about 54 days.

Non-urgent patients waited 157 days on average, down by 28 days since the previous quarter.

Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas said on Friday that the data showed stabilisation within the public healthcare system, something the government needed to achieve before significantly driving down waiting times.

“This data tells us that we’ve always got more work to do,” she said. “Getting our health system back to the best it can be – we have a laser-like focus on that.”

Thomas noted the unprecedented pressure healthcare staff have been under throughout the pandemic, stressing that the quarterly data covered a period in which Victoria experienced another peak in COVID-19 hospitalisations.

“You all know that treating patients with COVID is much more resource-intensive than caring for those without this infection,” she said, adding that the state’s public healthcare system required improvements within general practice and primary care – both of which come under the federal government’s jurisdiction – to return to what it was.

Shadow health minister Georgie Crozier expressed concern around the amount of time critically urgent Victorians were having to wait.

“These figures show more patients waiting even longer to get the basic care they deserve. When one in four patients can’t get the treatment they need in time, it’s clear the system has failed.”

“No Victorian should be left to drive themselves to hospital, or wait for a taxi, when they urgently need an ambulance.”

Crozier also took issue with the time it took to transfer mentally unwell adults from emergency departments to beds in mental health units.

About 60 per cent of these patients were made to wait longer than eight hours, a figure up by about 5 per cent compared to the same time last year.

“This is very detrimental to those patients [who] require the care, the treatment and a bed,” Crozier said.

“They’re waiting for over eight hours in an ED [emergency department]. They’re then causing a whole lot of issues for the ED because there’s no throughput. The system is just not working.”

Victorian Healthcare Association chief executive Leigh Clarke said the shortage of trained healthcare workers, especially those migrating from overseas, continued to drag on the system and contributed to wait times.

“We estimate our public hospitals are short of thousands of nurses across Victoria today,” Clarke said.

“This limits how much care our hospitals can deliver, how many wards they can open and how long patients will wait.”

The arrival in Australia of international healthcare workers is beginning to inch back up to pre-pandemic levels, but Clarke said more work was needed to meet the target set out in the Victorian Skills Plan of 22,000 new health and community care workers each year.

In better news for the state’s healthcare system, response times in emergency departments are improving.

The number of patients treated within the recommended time increased from around 60 per cent to nearly 65 per cent, and waiting times were down to 20 minutes, three minutes less than the previous quarter.

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