LAST Friday afternoon would have been a bad time to go into cardiac arrest in Wyndham.
The municipality was left without an available ambulance at about 3pm after crews at Point Cook, Tarneit and Hoppers Crossing were sent to jobs outside the area.
Only a Werribee car remained in the municipality, but at 3.15pm it was called to tend to a boy who had fallen off his scooter.
Hoppers Crossing paramedic Amanda Treloar said that with ambulances from surrounding municipalities also out on jobs, the closest crew to Wyndham was 30 kilometres away in the city.
She feared an ambulance wouldn’t be able to reach a patient who had gone in to cardiac arrest in time, and she criticised the dispatch system used by Ambulance Victoria.
“It’s hard for us locally because we know the area and what sort of coverage we have. It is scary to think there might not be a car here.”
Speaking to the Weekly 12 hours after she was asked to travel 42 kilometres from Hoppers Crossing to Melton West for a code 1 emergency, Ms Treloar said call-outs to far locations took their toll on paramedics and affected patients.
Last Thursday night, Ms Treloar and her colleague were judged by the dispatch system to be the closest car to an accident in Melton West. A man had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed. “We were considered to be the closest car, but there’s no easy way to get to Melton West from here. We plugged the address into the GPS and it said we’d have to travel 42 kilometres on code 1. We didn’t think we were going to get there. We thought another car would make themselves available, but we got there first.”
Earlier that night, Ms Treloar was called to help an elderly woman in Werribee who had fractured her hip.
Because Werribee Mercy Hospital is unable to treat hip fractures, the vehicle had to travel to Western Hospital in Footscray, which already had ambulances waiting outside.
“On our way there we were sent a page asking us to go to another hospital, but we couldn’t because [Footscray] was specific to our patient’s needs,” Ms Treloar said.
“One crew waited there for three hours from 12pm to 3pm. It’s hard [on paramedics] because when you see six ambulances at one hospital you wonder where the next job is going to go off and who will respond.”
Ambulance Victoria group manager Graeme Parker said dispatch records showed the organisation had the capability and capacity to respond to emergencies in Wyndham on Friday. He said the closest ambulance was sent to patients.
“Ambulance Victoria has a sophisticated system which allows us to move ambulances around and ensure they’re best placed to be at the right place and respond immediately to life-threatening emergencies 24 hours a day.
“Deployment of our paramedics is a dynamic process with the most appropriate ambulance despatched from the nearest location to triple-0 calls.
“In the instance, with limited ambulance resources available, our resource managers will move resources, relocate services and even increase the number of response resources where possible to make sure there are ambulances available for emergency cases.”
Ms Treloar said paramedics wanted Ambulance Victoria and the state government to improve resources and reduce ramping times so they could get back on the road faster.
