Page 143 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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effectively what is known from the first key stroke. So the time the emergency service call taker starts to enter the call into their system is when the clock starts running here in the territory. But that is not uniform across Australia. In fact, in many jurisdictions across Australia the measurement of response time only commences from when the request for an ambulance is actually given to the ambulance crew, when a crew is allocated.
There can often be a considerable period of time between when the call is taken and when the call is actually allocated to a crew for actual response. So in that respect it is little surprise to me that the ACT does not perform as well as other jurisdictions. Just in terms of that measure alone, we are disadvantaged. Ms Gallagher highlighted this in some comments yesterday about waiting lists for elective surgery. She made the point that you can change these things and make them look better if you are less honest with the figures. And we know that other jurisdictions do that; other jurisdictions do not count certain patients if they have stayed too long on the list, as Ms Gallagher outlined yesterday.
But we do not do that because we try to provide an accurate assessment and accurate figures to our community about how services are delivered. If that places us at a disadvantage compared to other jurisdictions who are not so open, who are not so transparent in their reporting, so be it. But we will continue to adopt an appropriate approach when it comes to measuring performance in these areas. The government has been working hard with the Ambulance Service and with the union that represents ambulance officers to improve the operations of our Ambulance Service, and I have been the first to acknowledge that our Ambulance Service is facing real pressures. It has only been in many respects down to the very significant level of goodwill and commitment by ambulance officers that we have continued to provide the very high level of service that we are able to provide.
We are taking steps to address these issues. Let us look first at the issue of growth in relation to our ambulance services—growth in the order of 10 per cent per year each and every year. That is a significant level of growth. It is compounded by the demand in other areas of the health service and the fact that the Ambulance Service often becomes the option that people turn to for various types of immediate medical care. For that reason, the government has already put in place additional crews and additional vehicles to try and help meet that demand.
We have moved to a demand-based model for the delivery of ambulance services so we have more ambulance vehicles on the road at the busiest times—busiest times being between about 7 o’clock in the morning through to around nine, 10 o’clock in the evening. At other periods of the day the crewing arrangements change to reflect the lesser demand that we know traditionally and usually occurs during those early hours of the morning.
So demand-based crewing has been a reform the government has put in place. Extra vehicles is another measure the government has put in place. Extra crews is another measure that the government has put in place. The government has also, through the Emergency Services Agency, put in place measures to reform the communications centre arrangements, to improve and streamline the operations of the communications
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