Ambulance Victoria had just 1% of its paramedics available to respond to emergencies across Melbourne for part of Tuesday night, forcing it to issue a “code red” due to the high demand.
In a statement released Wednesday, the service said it briefly enacted a code red alert – the same declaration issued for the Black Saturday bushfires and the deadly thunderstorm asthma event of 2016 – due to high demand in metropolitan Melbourne.
“The situation was able to be quickly resolved with services returning to normal within two hours,” an Ambulance Victoria spokesperson said.
The Victorian Ambulance Union secretary, Danny Hill, said just 1% of ambulances were available for a period on Tuesday night.
Hill said a combination of factors led to the declaration, including staff furloughs because of Covid-19 and increased presentations at emergency departments, which meant ambulances were forced to wait – or “ramp” – outside hospitals for long periods of time with patients on board.
“But at the end of the day we’re just seeing so many people dial triple-zero and a lot of it is for deferred care,” Hill said.
“A lot of paramedics are telling us that patients are not up to date with their preventative measures on their health, they may not have stockpiles of their Ventolin, things like that, they haven’t gotten back into the routine of regularly seeing their GP since Covid-19.”
Despite repeated pleas to Victorians to phone triple-zero for emergencies only, Hill said patients continue to call for non-urgent care.
“With events like this there’s a real level of frustration,” he said. “They [paramedics] go to work because they want to help save lives and they can’t do that because they’re either ramped at a hospital or they’re tied up in non-urgent calls or being used as a taxi.”
Hill said there has been about half a dozen code reds in the state throughout the pandemic, during which people may be directed to take taxis to hospital and non-emergency vehicles can be used to transfer patients.
Performance data for the last quarter shows Victorian paramedics were called to 91,397 Code 1 cases between October and December – a 16.2% increase on the same time in 2020 – and the most Code 1 cases in a quarter ever.
In the quarter, 66.5% of time critical Code 1 cases were responded to within 15 minutes, with a state-wide average response time of 15 minutes and 11 seconds.
Hill said it was hard to compare the situation to that of South Australia, where a new Labor government was elected earlier this month after pledging to reduce ramping.
“We’ve had a longer, slow burn of our circumstances over two years, whereas Covid-19 really crept up and hit South Australia and the government at the time had really not paid any attention to what was happening in other states at all. It’s been clumsy,” he said.
“It’s been there’s been a lot of errors, but the [Victorian] government has been quite engaging in saying what do we need to do to fix it and pumping a lot more resources into it.”
He said the government should look overseas for possible ways to tackle increased demand, including by having specialist ambulances for people in aged care, increasing triage services and providing more support for those with chronic conditions.
The Victorian opposition health spokesperson, Georgie Crozier, described the situation as a “disaster”.
“Victorians are dying under the Andrews government’s watch, it’s been years in the making and we need to fix it. Under a Liberals Nationals government, we will,” she said.
