“I saw her die,” Hussein said. “I knew she needed equipment and if they’d just come on time I reckon she’d be here today.”
Eleven days earlier,47-year-old father of threeNick Panagiotopoulos collapsed in his Preston home with chest pain. His family waited an agonising 25 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. When they eventually came,paramedics worked on him for 40 minutes,but he died.
Alisha and Nick are among 33 Victorians whose deaths have been linked to triple-zero delays or lengthy ambulance waits in a long-awaited report into Victoria’s troubled emergency call system released on Saturday.
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The two deaths coincided with a huge surge in calls to triple-zero in October 2021. Melbourne was in its sixth COVID lockdown (which ended on the 21st) and in the grips of the Delta wave.
It was a dire month for Victoria’s Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA). It was receiving an average of 2784 triple-zero calls for an ambulance each day and reported its lowest call response time in history.
The report released on Saturday by Inspector-General for Emergency Management Tony Pearce identified 40 “potential adverse events”,including cardiac arrests and asthma attacks,between December 2020 and May 2022 associated with ESTA call-taking delays.