Thursday, 9 June 2022

South-West Coast electorate health services

Ms BRITNELL (South-West Coast) (09:48): Mikayla is a 21-year-old who has battled rheumatoid arthritis for most of her life. She lives at Cooriemungle, about an hour from Warrnambool. Recently Mikayla suffered an acute flare-up of the condition, which attacked her stomach. It was pain like she had never experienced before and, given her high pain threshold, she knew she needed professional medical help. Mikayla rang for an ambulance. It was 6.30 pm and she was told no ambulances were available. Her partner, who had never seen Mikayla experience a flare-up of this kind, was extremely distressed himself and was forced to drive her to Warrnambool hospital.

After arriving at the hospital’s emergency department Mikayla was told she would be facing a 6-hour wait before she could be attended to. She described the scenes in the emergency department as heartbreaking. In her words, there were people waiting outside while others were in the waiting room, some of them in tears and in pain, waiting to be seen—people of all ages, including the elderly. Mikayla said she felt sorry for the overwhelmed staff at the hospital, who were amazing. In no way does she blame them for the long wait. The emergency department was just so overwhelmed. As Mikayla said, she is not one to flippantly call for an ambulance. She has lived with pain most of her life, but when a situation arose where she needed immediate medical help with an ambulance, she was unable to get one. Mikayla wanted her story told because, like so many others, it shows just how swamped our healthcare system is. We have never seen a crisis like this before, and it is one the government must fix immediately.