However,it wasn’t until December 2020 that ESTA made a state budget bid for extra funding,and that funding for 43 extra workers wasn’t announced until May 2021,about a year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic.
Asked what efforts were made to secure this funding more urgently,Ashworth said that none had occurred,and she didn’t believe ESTA had realised the significance of the volume of calls that might be coming.
She also revealed that at the time of Panagiotopoulos’ death,on October 16,2021,ESTA hadn’t yet been able to fill all 43 new roles that they had been funded for as the recruitment process was slow.
Telstra also offered call-taking staff to ESTA in November 2021,but the offer was refused,the court heard.
Ashworth said ESTA had rejected the offer because its recruitment process was already under way,and it was considered “just as efficient to recruit from the general public”,as Telstra staff would have needed training in ambulance call-taking.
Telstra runs a national service that transfers triple-zero calls to the appropriate state and service.It was recently hit with an outage that prevented emergency calls being transferred to Victoria.
Ashworth wasn’t employed by ESTA until November 2021,after the agency’s ambulance call-taking performance had already collapsed.
Key people,including ESTA’s former chief executive Marty Smyth,who resigned in October 2021,isn’t yet listed as a witness in the inquest. Neither is Tony Pearce,the long-serving inspector-general for emergency management who,until February,led the agency responsible for monitoring ESTA’s call-taking performance and oversaw a review of ESTA.
Last year,cardiologist Associate Professor Nicholas Cox told the inquest thatif emergency services had arrived even seven to 10 minutes after Nick Panagiotopoulos’ cardiac arrest,his “chances of survival were very good”.
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Cox said the delay in connecting to the ambulance operator was “contributory” to the 47-year-old’s death.
On Tuesday,Ashworth listed changes that had been implemented since 2021 to Victoria’s emergency call-taking,which included a 25 per cent boost to the workforce.
She said that if Triple Zero Victoria was to experience a similar pandemic-like surge of demand on top of the current high call volumes,the service would be well placed to meet the demand. But,she said,it would be difficult and could not be guaranteed.
Ashworth paid tribute to the frontline call-takers at Triple Zero Victoria and conveyed her condolences on behalf of the service to the Panagiotopoulos family.