Gippsland East electorate
Tim BULL (Gippsland East) (14:38): (44) My constituency question is to the Minister for Health, and the information that I seek is for the minister to provide current reimbursement time lines for the Victorian patient transport assistance scheme, or VPTAS as it is known. Constituents advise me that there is up to a 12-week wait presently for claims to be processed, which is well outside the benchmarks, I am led to believe, that are in place. Just this month a claim from last August was paid, and patients should not have to absorb these costs for that amount of time and be out of pocket for so long. So I ask the minister to provide for me what the average wait time is for claims to be processed against the benchmarks, and she might also like to include if there have been any additional resources allocated to VPTAS to streamline this process, but I am after that information more generally.