Ambo delays cause concern

AN ELDERLY man who fell and injured himself in Warburton last month and waited around 45 minutes for an ambulance has caused public concern towards paramedic services.
The man had a fall on Main Street, Warburton, on Friday 14 September in the evening when the temperature was around 11 degrees.
While waiting for an ambulance to arrive, the man received care from passers by, who kept the man warm and comfortable with blankets until he was transferred into an ambulance.
Warburton Postmaster Norman Orr, who was around during the long wait, said the extended ambulance response time was “nowhere near satisfactory”.
“He was clearly in a distressed state; there was blood on his chin, so he had hit the ground reasonably hard,” Mr Orr said.
Mr Orr said he had checked with the man’s wife on Friday 12 October, almost a month after the incident, and the injured man was still recovering.
He stressed that there needed to be more emphasis on funding Ambulance Victoria to provide better services, and speculated on whether the State Government’s halving of membership prices affected this negatively.
“While it’s helpful to the family budget, our joy should be short-lived if half price means half a service,” Mr Orr wrote in a letter to the editor.
The Baillieu Government is providing Ambulance Victoria with $241.9 million over the next three years to set off the halving of membership costs.
Ambulance Victoria classifies each of their callouts into urgency-specific codes, which are prioritised to help those in life-threatening situations.
Each code depends on a range of factors, which help to determine the urgency of an injury and so each individual case has to be assessed independently.
Ambulance Victoria’s media department was contacted for comment on the incident, but failed to respond by deadline.
The injured man was unavailable for comment.