An elderly man has died after waiting four hours for an ambulance to reach his home in Melbourne’s east. The state suffered a major paramedic shortage over the weekend.
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00:00It's a real tragedy and it's a question whether it could have been avoided.
00:05So on Sunday morning at around 2 o'clock this elderly man who lives in Surrey Hills, that's
00:11a suburb about 10km east of Melbourne CBD, his neighbours heard cries for help and they
00:17called for an ambulance.
00:19Sadly that did not come for about 4 hours.
00:22So around 6 o'clock a non-emergency crew showed up but at that point the man had tragically
00:28passed away.
00:29Now it's not known how he died.
00:32The police are preparing a report for the coroner so we will find out at that point
00:37what actually happened.
00:39But on this night the Ambulance Victoria was also experiencing huge shortages, so mass
00:45paramedic shortages due to seasonal illnesses and it says that at one point there were 50
00:52paramedic crews short.
00:53So that's a lot of paramedics that were down because of seasonal illness and this meant
00:57that people out in the community who were critically ill had to wait almost an hour
01:03or more than an hour in many situations for an ambulance.
01:07Now the union for Victoria's Ambulance says the real issue here is that people are feeling
01:12overworked and when their workloads are not managed well then they do end up getting sick
01:18and we are seeing these sort of paramedics then drop out and unable to come to work and
01:22get out to these really critical jobs.
01:25So the union says their workloads need to be managed better.
01:28They can't be skipping lunch breaks and finishing late consistently because this is kind of
01:33what happens.
01:34Now the Victorian government says issues like this, at some point ambulance services will
01:40be stressed.
01:41So these kind of issues are experienced and they can't really predict when people will
01:45genuinely fall sick, however they have reiterated that they will continue to invest in emergency
01:51services so they can continue to operate even under such stressful conditions.