New health data reveals ambulance response times are worsening, with over a third of urgent patients left waiting too long. The Victorian government is introducing changes at major hospitals to speed up patient processing and get ambulances back on the road faster. State political reporter Nicole Asher has more.
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00:00Left ramped and waiting. It's a familiar picture outside Victorian hospitals and it's not getting
00:08any better.
00:09A lot of the hospitals don't prioritise ambulance offload as they should. They use paramedics
00:14as labour.
00:17Ambulance Victoria data from October to December last year found urgent patients were waiting
00:23too long for a paramedic to arrive. 35% of cases had to wait more than 15 minutes.
00:30Now there's a new plan, requiring major hospitals to be quicker at transferring patients out
00:36of ambulances.
00:37Working towards our goal of 90% of patients who arrive being transferred within 40 minutes.
00:45To do that, new care standards are being introduced at 17 hospitals, bringing a raft of changes
00:51including emergency doctors admitting patients directly into wards, more patients diverted
00:57to a virtual ED and urgent care clinics and streamlining patient discharges to free up
01:03beds.
01:04It'll actually put more ambulances back out on the road to respond to those priority calls.
01:12But government data shows just eight Victorian hospitals reached that 40 minute transfer
01:18benchmark in the latest report.
01:20In Australia, best practice is a 20 minute offload time. Our target here in Victoria
01:24is 40 minutes. We think they should be striving towards 20 minutes.
01:28Across the board, one in three patients arriving in an ambulance to Victorian hospitals waited
01:33longer than 40 minutes to be transferred.
01:35The standards start from today and my expectation is that each health service that is involved
01:41will see a 4% improvement by the end of this financial year.
01:46The new processes don't come with more money and documents seen by the ABC show hospitals
01:51which failed to meet the mark face potential penalties, including being barred from applying
01:56for some new grants.