While the South Australian government says ambulance response times are improving, it admits there’s more work to do to bring ramping at hospitals down from near record levels.
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00:00 It was the issue which helped define last year's election campaign.
00:07 My commitment is to fix the ramping crisis. Now what does that mean?
00:10 Well that means getting ramping down to a level where when the ambulance is called,
00:14 when triple zero is called, an ambulance rolls up on time.
00:18 More than a year on, the now Premier and Health Minister say the government has made headway
00:22 on delivering improved ambulance response times.
00:26 Priority one call outs on a majority of occasions, the ambulance is now getting there on time.
00:31 Priority two cases, well it was only about 42% of the time last year that those cases were being met on time.
00:38 Now that's increased to 59%.
00:40 It's been backed by massive spends in successive state budgets,
00:44 which includes the recruitment of 146 extra ambulance staff since taking office,
00:49 plus a plan for more beds inside hospitals.
00:52 Despite all that, the headline ramping figures remain stubbornly high.
00:56 This graph represents the number of hours lost to ramping month by month
01:00 outside SA emergency departments since the 2022 state election.
01:05 At its peak in March this year, ambulance crews spent nearly 4,000 hours ramped.
01:10 And since taking office, the government has only twice recorded monthly ramping results
01:14 better than the former government's worst month of more than 2,800 hours lost to the practice.
01:20 In respect to ramping data, there is still a long way to go.
01:25 Year on year we are seeing improvement.
01:28 But they can't get away from the fact that their central promise was to fix ramping.
01:32 Before the election, they said ramping was the most significant crisis facing SA.
01:38 SA firefighters will soon get extra medical training.
01:41 It was a push sparked by the death of a man on Anzac Highway last year
01:45 who waited more than 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.
01:49 [BLANK_AUDIO]