Ambulance response times still lagging in South Australia

ABC NEWS (Australia)

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.

Transcript

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]

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