Tuesday, 14 May 2024

 Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (20:11): (876) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Health and Minister for Ambulance Services, and it concerns a very serious problem of ambulance ramping and the completion of the Goulburn Valley Health hospital. The action that I seek is for the minister to increase funding for additional ambulance services in the Goulburn Valley to ensure there are paramedics on the roads when ramping occurs at GV Health and to invest in completing the redevelopment of GV Health, including a clinical health school.

At the very moment the Treasurer was standing up to deliver the budget last Tuesday – a budget that would cut $20 million from ambulance services and $207 million from public health – my office received a telephone call from a constituent calling to tell me that there were nine ambulances ramped at the emergency department at Goulburn Valley Health. During the same day another constituent counted 13 ambulances ramped at the hospital. The constituent advised that two of the ambulances had been waiting for 4 hours and the Victorian Ambulance Union posted that all ambulances from Shepparton, Mooroopna, Tatura and Numurkah were currently ramped at the hospital and crews had ramped for up to 9 hours the previous night. A staff member at GV Health reported that there were 70 people waiting for treatment, some of whom had been there since 7 am, and this was happening even though Shepparton already has a priority primary care centre.

Staff at GV Health are reporting they are exhausted from working double shifts. I have repeatedly spoken in this place about the desperate need for the government to build a clinical health school at Goulburn Valley Health to address the critical staff shortages. Currently GV Health has a shortage of around 550 staff, including over 200 nurses, around 130 mid-tier doctors and 65 allied health workers. These are frontline service vacancies that must be filled immediately, but instead of investing in health the Treasurer cut $207 million from the public health budget.

The Allan government has its priorities wrong. It has prioritised projects like the Suburban Rail Loop ahead of vital health services in regional Victoria. Stage 2 or the completion of Goulburn Valley Health is one of those projects that the government has shelved, with no funding allocated to it and the health minister recently declaring the hospital redevelopment is complete. The government knows it is not complete, or it would not have funded planning for stage 2 in the 2019–20 state budget. I can assure the government that I know and my constituents know the project is not complete and the demand for an expansion of the facilities will only grow as the region continues to grow.

In addition, our hardworking paramedics who save lives every day and confront the most difficult and traumatic scenes when they attend car crashes, domestic violence incidents and other medical emergencies deserve to be supported with adequate funding that ensures staffing and equipment levels are at a level needed to support paramedics to perform their vital work.