More than 50 ambulance crews left unstaffed in VIC on Saturday night

ABC NEWS (Australia)

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.

Transcript

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.

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