Health system
Mr GUY (Bulleen—Leader of the Opposition) (14:29): My question is to the Premier. Ambulance ramping returned last night at the Royal Melbourne and Austin hospitals. Can the Premier advise how many ambulances were ramped and how many Victorians were denied the immediate hospital care that they sought?
Mr ANDREWS (Mulgrave—Premier) (14:30): I would need to refer the question to either those hospitals that the Leader of the Opposition has raised and/or Ambulance Victoria in order to provide—well, there are moments in time, obviously, throughout an evening and then there is the whole evening, and ambulances turn up and go every minute of every hour. It is a dynamic environment. It is called an emergency department. They do not have, ‘Oh, we only take X number of patients per hour’. It is a 24/7, open-all-the-time dynamic environment. Those who have spent some time in and around this part of the health system or even have any common sense would know and understand that, so it is rather difficult to provide a concise answer to the Leader of the Opposition. If I can relevantly add anything after making inquiries with the agencies I have just cited, I will.
As for the denial of care, every nurse, every ambo, every doctor and every member of a very big clinical team is not about denying care, and on their behalf I refute that. They are about providing the very best care in a situation where there are a couple of points that are inconvenient for the narrative of some but are facts nonetheless. We have more patients needing care than we have ever seen. And why is that? Well, because for the best of reasons many people have not received the primary care that they perhaps ought to have got last year and the year before. They deferred for the best of reasons. No-one is having a go at them, but for the best of reasons they perhaps did not get the primary care—that is not run by the state: primary care—that they ought to have got in order to be as well as possible.
There are also many, many people whose conditions have deteriorated because of absolutely critical restrictions to our health system for the safety of those who were time critical and needed that care and could least afford to have our health system overrun. It is, after all—although you would not know it from listening to some—a wildly contagious disease. Then of course the other factor for which there is never any recognition from those opposite is that today, right now, there are hundreds and thousands of staff—paramedics, nurses, doctors, every member of the team; every team across the state is experiencing this—who cannot report for duty because they are sick. They are superhuman in the work that they do, but they are not immune from this virus, and they are the last people who are going to come to work sick and potentially make others even worse. I reject the criticism of our health workers in this question.
Mr R Smith interjected.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Warrandyte can leave the chamber for the period of an hour.
Member for Warrandyte withdrew from chamber.
Mr GUY (Bulleen—Leader of the Opposition) (14:33): There were also considerable queues at the Sunshine Hospital emergency department on Monday—stretched queues into the car park—with sick and injured people queueing in the cold because the emergency department was at capacity and overflowing. Mildura hospital was also on a code yellow with limited capacity. I ask the Premier: how many Victorian hospitals have declared a code yellow in the last month?
Mr ANDREWS (Mulgrave—Premier) (14:33): I would refer the Leader of the Opposition to the answer I gave to his substantive question. In terms of ramping and pressure in our emergency departments, I again make the point—although there will be precious little recognition from those opposite because it does not suit their political narrative—that we are in the midst of a global pandemic. That means we have got less staff. We have not got all the staff we need because thousands of them are sick, and we have got more patients than we have ever seen. Those two things mean there is pressure—absolute pressure—on the system. One can only wonder: imagine if you were not putting money into the system and instead you were cutting funding, or put it another way—imagine if this virus had turned up in early 2015, not early 2020, before we had repaired the damage done by choice by those opposite. We will not be lectured by those opposite, who cut every chance they get.