Health officials say high COVID-19 numbers and relaxed restrictions led to a 'fluctuation' in performance in hospitals and ambulance response times in the first three months of the year.
Ambulances in NSW are taking longer to respond to emergencies than at any point since records were publicly available 12 years ago, new data reveals.At 8.8 minutes it is at the highest mark since BHI records were first publishedThe quarterly report from the Bureau of Health Information tracked the performance of public hospitals and ambulance services from January to March this year.
The median time for ambulances to respond to the most urgent cases was 8.8 minutes, the highest since the BHI started reporting in 2010, but within the 10-minute target. Bree Edge's five-year-old daughter Asha, who has adrenal insufficiency, was losing consciousness when she called an ambulance to her home in Buxton in February this year."I don't blame paramedics, I don't blame the medical staff, but as a whole it is just absolutely not good for patients in dire situations to be waiting an hour or more for an ambulance," she told the ABC.
Ambulance services across Australia on Tuesday launched a campaign titled Save Triple-0 for Emergencies.Three in four patients waited for more than four hours before being admitted, while one in 10 spent longer than 18 hours in emergency departments. "When you talk about emergency departments, it's one thing to talk about data points, it's another thing to talk about effort."