More than 30 Victorians died from emergencies that were linked to triple-zero delays or lengthy ambulance waits, a report into the state's beleaguered emergency call system has found.
The report, by Inspector-General for Emergency Management Tony Pearce, found that the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority’s (ESTA) call answer speed had “fallen below community and government expectations”, with one Victorian forced to wait more than 70 minutes for their emergency call to be answered in January.
Potentially life-saving care has been delayed during to problems getting through to triple-zero ambulance operators.Credit:The Age
In a second report released on Saturday morning into the state’s preparedness for public health emergencies, Pearce found Victoria’s level of preparedness had not been assessed prior to the pandemic.
Pearce identified 40 "potential adverse events" between December 2020 and May 2022 associated with answering delays, command decisions and resourcing issues.
“Tragically, 33 people did not survive these emergencies. This does not necessarily mean that call answer delay was a contributing factor because in some cases no amount of rapid intervention would have saved the patient,” Pearce said.
“What it does mean is that due to these call answer delays, the community waited longer to receive important first aid advice, and paramedics had less time to apply advanced treatment in time to make a difference to the patient’s outcome.”
The report found the COVID-19 pandemic had put Victoria’s health system under strain, particularly ESTA and caused answer times to blow out from the five-second target to, in some cases, more than 10 minutes.
Pearce found the number of calls answered within the five-second target “was consistently under the 90 per cent benchmark”.
In September 2021, ESTA’s statewide call answer speed performance dropped to 67.8 per cent before sliding to its lowest point in January 2022, when it only answered 39 per cent of calls in five seconds.
On January 14, ESTA received more than 2500 calls, with 139 people forced to wait more than 10 minutes for a responder to answer.
"Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, ESTA had typically been compliant with the monthly call answer performance benchmark," the report found.
By the end of the 2020-21 financial year, ESTA had answered 884,962 emergency ambulance calls, which was 53,201 more than the previous year.
In 2021, Pearce announced he would conduct a major review into the failings of the triple-zero system.
More to come.
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