“We have given ESTA funding before and throughout the pandemic to help with demand and put on extra resources when they’ve needed it.”
Two experienced call takers said the issue of understaffing had been regularly raised with ESTA management by workers in multiple forums over many years and “regularly dismissed”.
One of the workers,who couldn’t be identified because they still work at ESTA,said they had kept records of call answering delays around May 2019,including waits of more than two minutes to reach ambulance operators and four minutes to reach police.
“At that point we said ‘you’re going to kill someone’. This is not acceptable.
“To blame COVID-19 is disgraceful … COVID has made it busy … but we should be able to ramp up to that,and we haven’t been able to because our staffing models were already broken.”
Pictures of wall screen displays from ESTA posted by Ambulance Employees Australia on Facebook as part of their ‘No Call Should Wait’ campaign,also in May 2019,showed that at times 10 police calls were taking up to 84 seconds to be answered and five ambulance calls were waiting for up to a minute or more.
Since last year,call waits have blown out to more than 30 minutes in some cases and two of the people whose deaths were linked to extreme triple-zero call answer delays – Preston fatherNick Panagiotopoulos and schoolgirlAlisha Hussein – waited around 15 minutes for emergency calls from their loved ones to be answered.
Last week,amid news of more deaths,the Victorian government pledged more than $115 million for the service and 120 new staff,following money for a further 43 new staff made available in last year’s budget.
ESTA’s interim chief executive Stephen Leane,a former senior police officer who was asked to take on the job of fixing the organisation afterthe departure of Marty Smyth in October last year,says it will take time to turn things around,as they recruit and train new staff.
Sue Riley,now the secretary of the Communications Workers Union in Victoria,was one of the signatories of the December 2016 letter to Mr Merlino when the Deputy Premier served as Victoria’s emergency services minister,a role he held from June 2016 to November 2018.
Ms Riley said in 2014 the union tried to bring about minimum safe staffing levels at ESTA,claiming that there were times when,for example,there were five police call takers looking after the entire state of Victoria – one operator for a million or more people.
But following protracted industrial action,she said they eventually agreed with ESTA management that it would bring in 48 new full-time equivalent staff. She said union officials were later shocked to discover that the promised workers,which had been announced to ESTA staff in an email and described as a “necessity”,were no longer being employed.
“It was kind of accidentally revealed to us in a meeting. We sort of stopped the meeting and said ‘what!’.
“All we got really was an apology.”
The number of full-time call takers and dispatchers at ESTA has increased by an average of 15 staff a year since 2016. ESTA says it has increased its ambulance call-taking and dispatch workforce by the equivalent of about 30 full-time staff since the start of the pandemic,despite recruitment challenges.
Data obtained byThe Age shows between late September and mid-December there were more than 40,000 triple-zero ambulance calls delayed and waiting at least a minute to be connected.
Victoria Ambulance Union secretary Danny Hill said if safe minimum staffing arrangements had been introduced,the extreme delays now being reported out of ESTA would have been prevented.
“Any of those things have just been shut down every time we’ve sort of brought them forward,” he said.
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“No government likes to be tied to recruitment numbers in enterprise bargaining,which I think is quite short-sighted because you’re much better off having steady consistent growth to avoid getting into crisis,rather than waiting till you get to a number where you have to pull in an extra 120 staff in one hit.”
The promised new workers were announced to ESTA staff in a July 2015 email titled “Good News”. The staff were to include 22 operational full-time equivalent staff for police,14 for fire and 12 for ambulance.
“This news means more hands on deck,something we all agree is a current priority and necessity,particularly as we address the increasing demand on the triple zero service from the Victorian public,” the email said.
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