HEALTH Minister Jillian Skinner insists there is no problem with a shortage of resources for ambulances or hospital beds, despite a string of delays and even deaths that occurred during periods of peak ambulance demand and resource shortages.
Fairfax Media has revealed four deaths since October last year that involved cases in which the person had waited more than half an hour for paramedics to arrive, as well as a string of serious delays linked to ambulance availability.
At the same time ambulances have been left queueing six deep at hospital emergency departments, particularly in western Sydney, to offload patients to emergency departments that are too busy to accept them.
Last Wednesday, Labor and the Christian Democratic Party called for an investigation into ambulance resourcing after Fairfax revealed NSW Ambulance had downgraded a number of incidents including those involving serious haemorrhage after a sexual assault or suicide attempt so they would no longer receive the most timely "emergency" ambulance response.
Mrs Skinner told a press conference she had asked the ambulance service to review its emergency categories.
"This is not about a lack of resources in ambulance. We have increased the ambulance budget and added 270 full-time equivalent paramedics," she said.
The Auditor-General has previously ordered that the use of ambulance teams to wait with patients at hospital emergency departments that were too busy to accept them should be phased out by December last year, but so far this practice has not stopped.
But Mrs Skinner said she was implementing programs across the hospital system, including appointing nurses in emergency departments to take patients from paramedics.
She said all of the less serious, category two, patients should still expect paramedics to arrive within half an hour, and the average time it took for more serious category one patients, just over 11 minutes, was not bad. She would not comment on patient deaths.
