“Funding for emergency services staff shouldn’t be made after there’s a crisis or when there is a crisis.”
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Last financial year,when there were major Delta and Omicron coronavirus outbreaks in Victoria,there was a more than 14 per cent jump in emergency ambulance calls.
On Tuesday,Emergency Services Minister Jaclyn Symes was asked why it had taken so long to act,given there were reports of delays long before the pandemic. She said that “there weren’t delays before the pandemic”.
“ESTA is a fantastic organisation … They were meeting their benchmark of answering 90 per cent of calls within five seconds. That is a higher benchmark than any other state. Other states’ benchmark is 10 seconds.”
Before the pandemic and as it began,Victoria had been one of the nation’s better performers for ambulance calls,answering about 94 per cent within 10 seconds in the 2019-20 financial year. NSW recorded about 80 per cent between 2015 and 2019.
However,between July 2020 and June 2021,only 88.9 per cent of Victorian ambulance calls were answered within 10 seconds,a rate below every other state except Western Australia.
The long-awaited report on emergency call answering performance by ESTA’s watchdog,the Inspector-General for Emergency Management,was given to Symes on August 5 following therelease of another review of ESTA by former Victoria Police chief commissioner Graham Ashton in May.
Symes promised to release the 250-page report in full.
She again apologised to anyone who had experienced delays,but said ESTA was “performing really well now”.
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Shadow emergency services spokesman Brad Battin said the delays were putting lives at risk and people left on hold deserved an explanation from the government.
“The triple-zero crisis here in Victoria has continued to plague the system and means people have to wait too long when on hold,” Battin said.
“These delays are not just COVID-related. We’ve known since 2016 that there are flaws in the triple-zero system,and the Andrews government had report after report to say ‘fix it’.”
Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas said the emergency services system,just like the broader health system,had come under enormous pressure.
“We were concerned about ESTA response times,so we commissioned the Ashton review. We are backing that in now with a $330 million investment,more than 400 staff being employed to improve call answering time in Victoria.”
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