Page 367 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 1991
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Ambulance Service
MR BERRY: My question is directed to the Minister responsible for health, Mr Humphries. Now that the Labor Opposition has exposed the Government's failure to provide adequate ambulance services in the ACT, and we have provided the public with the evidence of the ambulance station closures in January, will the Minister assure the Assembly that so far for the month of February there have been sufficient staff members to man the agreed level of four ambulances?
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I do not carry details on the previous few days' manning figures in the Ambulance Service in with me each day to the Assembly, any more than I am sure that Mr Berry carried such figures in with him, even though the situation was in crisis when Mr Berry was Minister. The situation is that from time to time there are less than four crews available - actually sitting in an ambulance station to go out and attend to emergencies - but that is not to say that there are not four crews available in emergencies when the situation requires four full crews. People involved in training exercises, for example, are often available at some little notice to become involved in some emergency.
I can only repeat the information, which has been relayed ad nauseam to Mr Berry, that the Government intends to improve the quality of the Ambulance Service as best it can by the recruitment of additional people beyond the additional seven staff already recruited - whom Mr Berry was unable to attract to the Ambulance Service - and thereby ensure that the ACT Ambulance Service remains as responsive as possible.
Mr Berry can measure that service by the number of ambulance stations that are open from time to time. That is a stupid way of doing it.
Mr Connolly: Not if you live in an area without an ambulance station.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, if a person has an accident or requires transport to a hospital and, say, the ambulance at Calwell transports a patient from a suburb nearby to, say, Royal Canberra Hospital South, and then another person somewhere in the vicinity of Calwell requires an ambulance, clearly we cannot have a second ambulance crew standing by at Calwell in case there should be some previous commitment for the first crew available at Calwell.
It follows, Mr Speaker, that the issue is not which stations happen to have an ambulance crew sitting in there and ready to go to an emergency at any particular time; the issue is: How many crews are there in the Territory which are available to meet situations as they arise? Mr Speaker, as I have said before, in my view the ACT Ambulance Service's capacity to respond to situations as
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