00:00 A family's agony over the latest tragedy to come to light in the state's ramping crisis.
00:07 I'm angry because my dad had to watch the woman he loved more than anything on this
00:17 earth suffering and not knowing, not knowing when the ambulance is coming.
00:22 72-year-old Betty Dobson was battling pancreatic cancer when she died last year from a perforated
00:28 bowel.
00:29 In February, Betty's husband Stephen called Triple Zero when his wife was suffering extreme
00:34 abdominal pain.
00:35 He says after waiting for an hour, he called back only to be told there wasn't an ambulance
00:41 available, then choosing to drive his wife to the nearby Nolunga Hospital.
00:45 It took us a lot of, my neighbour and I, a lot of trouble and a lot of pain to get her
00:50 into a small car.
00:51 Whether the ambulance was there earlier or not, it wouldn't have prolonged her life,
00:55 but it certainly would have alleviated the pain.
00:58 Stephen approached the state opposition with his experience after Liberal leader David
01:01 Spears put a call out to anyone affected by the state's ramping crisis.
01:06 But ambulance service logs obtained by the ABC show only 22 minutes between Stephen's
01:11 calls, as opposed to the rough hour that he and the opposition claimed.
01:16 Betty was listed as a priority three patient by the ambulance service, a level which is
01:21 aimed to be attended to in under 30 minutes.
01:24 An opposition spokesperson told the ABC the family could have hardly had the stopwatch
01:28 out during the incident, and questioned why the family were told no ambulances were available
01:33 at the time.
01:35 The opposition did not respond to why they did not verify the Dobson family's claim.
01:40 The government says ambulance wait times for high priority call outs are improving, with
01:44 more than 75 per cent of priority one calls attended on time in December last year.
01:50 But the opposition says despite these statistics, the ramping crisis remains.
01:55 It doesn't matter which month, over the nearly two years in office that we look at, they
01:59 have delivered the worst 18 months of ramping in our state's history.
02:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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