Questions without notice and ministers statements
Ambulance response times
Mr GUY (Bulleen—Leader of the Opposition) (14:01): My question is to the Minister for Ambulance Services. Ambulance Victoria has again failed to meet its response time targets, with code 1 responses falling below the 85 per cent, 15-minute target down to 77 per cent. I ask the minister: why are so many Victorians not getting the ambulance they need in the time that they need it?
Mr FOLEY (Albert Park—Minister for Health, Minister for Ambulance Services, Minister for Equality) (14:02): I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question. It does give me the opportunity to just acknowledge the extraordinary efforts that our Ambulance Victoria paramedics and other staff associated with Ambulance Victoria have been undertaking every day, but particularly over the course of this global pandemic. We have seen those employees put in extraordinary efforts over the last 21 months under the most difficult of circumstances. Those difficult circumstances have required them to deal with an increasing number of COVID cases and increasingly, for their own protection and for the protection of the wider Victorian community, to deal with cases that they suspect to be COVID. That means full-level PPE. That means challenging circumstances when such suspected or actual cases of COVID are brought to emergency departments or other locations.
It has also seen Ambulance Victoria take on the whole process of the greater coordination and streaming of COVID patients and suspected COVID patients across our public health and primary health care systems, all of which, together with further changes that have been required to keep our emergency departments and our frontline healthcare workers at hospitals safe, has unfortunately, as it has across the country, seen delays and extra time taken in both the transferring and the treatment of such COVID or suspected COVID cases.
Added to that, over the course of 2021, as a basis of deferred care right across the country we have seen increased, if you like, normal demand for deferred care in a whole range of other areas absolutely skyrocket. As a result of that in Victoria, New South Wales and right across the commonwealth we have seen ambulance response times and the interface between our Ambulance Victoria services and our public health emergency departments and wider services decline in performance. That is why all states and territories joined together very recently to raise with the commonwealth that now is the opportunity for a genuine partnership to reimagine how our public health services, including ambulances, are dealt with in a genuine national partnership to address precisely the very issue the honourable issue the Leader of the Opposition addressed.
Mr FOLEY (Albert Park—Minister for Health, Minister for Ambulance Services, Minister for Equality) (14:05): As a result of some extraordinary contributions and partnerships between this government and the predecessor ministers of health that the Andrews Labor government has had over the course of its term of office, those benchmarks were met as a result of billions of dollars of investment in our ambulance service and in our now wider emergency health services. That meant more paramedics, it meant more ambulances, it meant more ambulance stations and indeed in recent budgets, particularly the last two, it has seen hundreds of millions of dollars in further investment from my good friend the Treasurer into those very services. So I look forward—when this global pandemic is out of the way, when Victorians through their extraordinary contributions, through vaccination, have got us through to the other side—to getting again into that space of partnering with Ambulance Victoria, with our paramedics, to get us back to that world-class standard.