By LUKE VOOGT
Geelong patients are receiving quicker ambulance response times according to figures released by the State Government this week.
Acting Minister for Ambulance Services James Merlino said the Ambulance Victoria figures showed significant improvement since Labor assumed government.
“The figures couldn’t be clearer. The Andrews Labor government’s commitment to improving our ambulance service means a safer and quicker response for local patients.”
According to the figures, the average response time to reach Code 1 emergencies (incidents that require lights and sirens) in Geelong was 13.18 minutes in 2015/16, compared to 13.26 in 2014/15.
Mr Merlino instead chose to compare this to 14.30 minutes in 2013/14; the last financial year of the previous government.
Over a two-year period, he said, the proportion of ambulances which arrived within 15 minutes for the most time-critical patients – including cardiac arrest, heart attack, major trauma and stroke patients – increased from 67.1 per cent to 73 per cent.
In the last Victorian Budget, the government invested an additional $144 million in the ambulance system, Mr Merlino said.
The budget also contained a $27.3 million boost to rebuild and upgrade ambulance stations and purchase additional vehicles, he said.
Bellarine MP Lisa Neville said the previous Liberal government, in their last year, were responsible for Victoria having the worst ambulance response times on Australia’s mainland.
“Under the previous Liberal government, emergency wait times ballooned and patients suffered. Thanks to our investment in ambulance services, that’s changing.”
Yet local Coalition MP Simon Ramsay was puzzled “at the Andrew government’s euphoria” and said state-wide figures showed ambulance times had deteriorated over the last quarter.
While there had been small improvement in Geelong’s centre, Mr Ramsay said, rural and growth corridors response times had “blown out” from the last reporting period.
“The Andrews government has also only used Code 1 response times which they have prioritised at the expense of the Code 2 responses,” Mr Ramsay said.
He said ambulance times had deteriorated since Labor took government and that Dan Andrews had broken his election commitment to reduce them.
According to Labor, the number of Victorian patients waiting for elective surgery is at its lowest level since June 2010.
Geelong Hospital reduced the number of patients waiting from 1118 at the end of the June 2015 quarter to 1079 at the end of June.
The hospital also recorded increases amount of emergency and elective surgery patients it treated during in the June quarter, according to Labor.
On 30 June this year, 37,004 people remained on the waiting list in Victoria – the lowest number since the last year of the Brumby Labor government, when there were 36,988.
Waiting lists hit a record 50,054 patients under the Liberals in March 2013, Acting Minister for Health Martin Foley said.
