By Cathy O’Leary
The West Australian (Perth)
Copyright 2006 West Australian Newspapers Limited
All Rights Reserved
West Australians are being forced to endure unacceptably long waits for ambulances, with the service failing to meet national standards across all categories in the past year, including emergencies.
St John Ambulance’s annual report shows that response times across all three areas of emergency, urgent and non-urgent, fell short of the national standard, which requires 90 per cent of patients to be seen on time.
In 2005-06, 86.86 per cent of urgent calls were seen within the recommended 25 minutes, a drop from 87.52 per cent in the previous year.
While emergency and non-urgent response times improved, they still fell short of the targets, with 89.03 per cent of emergency call-outs seen within 15 minutes and 87.4 per cent of non-urgent cases seen within an hour.
But St John defended its performance yesterday, arguing that extra resources from the State Government, including 100 paramedics over five years, meant response times had improved in recent months and were now up to scratch.
Chief executive Tony Ahern said call-out times were now meeting the 90 per cent target and he was confident they could be maintained or improved.
“In the second half of last year it wasn’t good at all and we were really struggling, whereas this year we’ve started to see a turnaround,” Mr Ahern said.
“We’ve seen a dramatic improvement in the first four months of this financial year.”
Mr Ahern said there had also been a drop in rates of ramping, in which paramedics have to wait at busy emergency departments until they can hand over their patients, and diversion, whereby busy emergency departments are closed to ambulances.
Australian Medical Association WA president Geoff Dobb said the ambulance service had done well to maintain its response times given the enormous pressures it faced.
But he said the reduction in diversion and ramping just meant problems of high patient demand had been moved elsewhere in the system, such as hospital wards where they were less visible.
Director-general of health Neale Fong said improving response times for ambulances and a reduction in ramping showed that a Health Department trial to distribute ambulances more evenly among hospitals was working.
“We’re over the moon because we’ve got zero diversion and ramping is right down, and ambulance response times are improving even though at times they’re having to travel farther,” he said.
Dr Fong rejected claims hospital wards were bearing the brunt of high demand and said they had only taken extra patients, a practice known as over-census, on a few occasions.