Tuesday, 5 May 2026

 Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (19:00): (1639) My adjournment matter this evening is for the Minister for Health and Minister for Ambulance Services, and the action I seek is an investigation into an incident impacting one of my constituents. My constituent Rick Edgley and his wife Jennifer had trouble getting an ambulance a couple of weeks ago. On a Saturday morning Rick called 000 at 4:30 am, when Jennifer was having an issue with her bowel, and was told he would receive a call back, which he did, at 5:04 am. They said an ambulance would not be available to transport her from her home, which is in The Honeysuckles near Seaspray, so about half an hour or 40 minutes from Sale, for several hours, so they suggested that Rick drive Jennifer to the hospital himself and offered a taxi voucher to take her to Sale. Once they arrived at Sale they were told Jennifer needed critical care and would be transferred to Dandenong. They were told by staff at Sale hospital, Central Gippsland Health, that she needed to be transferred within the hour, and they arranged for an ambulance to do so. The ambulance then did not show up for 3 hours, and by the time she arrived at Dandenong the surgeons that had been arranged for her had gone home due to the delay in her arriving. She then had to wait until the next day to have surgery, which took 10 hours, as her condition got worse as her bowel had split. She was then in the ICU for a period of time.

This was a situation where specifically the delay in the ambulance caused the health situation of Jennifer to deteriorate significantly. Both Rick and Jennifer have told us that all the staff they dealt with were great at both Sale hospital and Dandenong and the ambulance service, but they are extremely frustrated at the delay in getting an ambulance first from their home to Sale and secondly to be transferred to Dandenong, such that it actually caused a significant deterioration in her health.

There was a separate issue that came to my attention literally on the same day of another gentleman in the Sale area, who had extreme pain in his lower back and could not move. He managed to reach his phone and call 000 and was told they were an hour away. An hour later he called back and was told that the ambulance would be a further 4 hours away. Eventually it was a friend who got him into a car and took him to hospital, and he was admitted straightaway. Again, he noted that both the ambulance and the staff at the hospital were wonderful. Both of these circumstances, though, demonstrate a significant problem still with the ambulance service, and I seek the minister to investigate Rick and Jennifer’s situation, a wholly unacceptable one for people in regional Victoria, let alone anywhere else in the state.