Friday was a very ordinary day in Sydney. The city did not suffer an earthquake and no major catastrophe occurred to disrupt essential services, and yet an eighty-three year old woman lay in pain on a footpath and waited three hours for an ambulance to arrive.
It was a simple fall caused by the unsteadiness of age and it resulted in a broken arm. Already suffering from a serious kidney illness this woman was slipping in and out of consciousness and many people who witnessed this accident called 000 and asked for an ambulance - urgently.
The public did all it could to alleviate her distress. Umbrellas were produced to shield her from the sun, people brought water for her to sip and when she started to shiver with shock blankets were produced to keep her warm - and repeated calls were made to try and determine why there was no ambulance response as each hour slipped by.
It was evident that there simply were no ambulance vehicles available to respond to this call - and it would have been the same if calls were for a person having chest pains or suffering a stroke - or if a car crash involved life or death intervention to save lives. For some unknown reason the Ambulance Service of New South Wales was not responding to calls in a reasonable time frame !
We are aware that all is not well within the ambulance service. There seems to be strife in the upper echelon of management and we hear claims of unreasonable rostering and bullying. It is evident that problems exist with communications between remote call centres and actual ambulance hubs and sometimes despatches from far flung ambulance stations defy logic when ambulances are unused in stations close to the accident scene.
By far the biggest cause of ambulance delay - is trolley block. It is not unusual to have a large number of ambulances in a waiting queue outside a hospital emergency department, waiting for hours because overload prevents emergency staff from receiving and treating the patients they are trying to deliver. In such circumstances, they are required to stand by and treat those within the ambulances until emergency can cover the situation - and that can take hours. On a bad day, more that half the city ambulance fleet may be caught in this situation and unable to respond to calls.
There is an obvious answer to this problem. We either need to expand emergency rooms to deliver a quicker ambulance turnaround - or we need to roster retired ambulance crews or off duty ambulance people to fill the gap and treat this overload outside emergency rooms - freeing the ambulance fleet to respond to emergencies.
Kitting out an ambulance is a very costly procedure. It is really a mobile hospital and the paramedics are trained to keep people alive until they get to a fully equipped emergency room. In the vast number of serious cases the time factor is vitally important. Lives are saved if the correct treatment can be given in time - and that is precisely what paramedics are trained to deliver, but to do that they need to get to the patient without delay.
On Friday, Sydney was subjected to a third world medical response - and that is simply not good enough ! No doubt the ambulance service will cite "unusual circumstances " but what is required is a point by point breakdown of what happened - and how it can be prevented from happening again.
The ball is back in the court of the Health Ministry. If the ambulance service needs change to sort out the problems - then so be it ! If the Health Minister is not up to the job - get another !
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