00:00Left ramped and waiting. It's a familiar picture outside Victorian hospitals and it's not getting
00:08any better.
00:09A lot of the hospitals don't prioritise ambulance offload as they should. They use paramedics
00:14as labour.
00:17Ambulance Victoria data from October to December last year found urgent patients were waiting
00:23too long for a paramedic to arrive. 35% of cases had to wait more than 15 minutes.
00:30Now there's a new plan, requiring major hospitals to be quicker at transferring patients out
00:36of ambulances.
00:37Working towards our goal of 90% of patients who arrive being transferred within 40 minutes.
00:45To do that, new care standards are being introduced at 17 hospitals, bringing a raft of changes
00:51including emergency doctors admitting patients directly into wards, more patients diverted
00:57to a virtual ED and urgent care clinics and streamlining patient discharges to free up
01:03beds.
01:04It'll actually put more ambulances back out on the road to respond to those priority calls.
01:12But government data shows just eight Victorian hospitals reached that 40 minute transfer
01:18benchmark in the latest report.
01:20In Australia, best practice is a 20 minute offload time. Our target here in Victoria
01:24is 40 minutes. We think they should be striving towards 20 minutes.
01:28Across the board, one in three patients arriving in an ambulance to Victorian hospitals waited
01:33longer than 40 minutes to be transferred.
01:35The standards start from today and my expectation is that each health service that is involved
01:41will see a 4% improvement by the end of this financial year.
01:46The new processes don't come with more money and documents seen by the ABC show hospitals
01:51which failed to meet the mark face potential penalties, including being barred from applying
01:56for some new grants.
Comments