Fact check: Are Victorians waiting longer than ever for ambulances to arrive?

Victorian Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews has put health policy at the centre of Labor’s election campaign.

A former health minister in the Brumby Labor government, Mr Andrews has singled out ambulance response times as a problem ahead of the state’s November 29 election.

“The ambulance service has never been worse, response times have never been longer and those minutes matter,” he said in an announcement on November 24.

And in a campaign advertisement, he says: “Ambulances take longer to arrive than ever before.”

ABC Fact Check takes a look at ambulance response times in Victoria.

Code one response times

The most serious calls made to ambulance services are designated as “code one”. These are the life-threatening call outs that require a red-light-running, sirens-blaring response. They are time critical, and Ambulance Victoria’s target is to respond to 85 per cent of them within 15 minutes.

Fact Check asked Mr Andrews’s office what he based his claim on, and a spokesman referred to the times for code one responses as reported in Ambulance Victoria’s annual reports.

According to the 2013-14 Ambulance Victoria annual report, released in October, 73.7 per cent of code one cases were responded to in under 15 minutes.

Ambulance Victoria’s annual reports are only available for the past six financial years because that was when Victoria’s rural and metropolitan ambulance services were amalgamated into one statewide service. They contain figures on response times since 2004-05.

The reports show a steady decline in the percentage of code one responses answered in under 15 minutes. In 2004-05, 87.7 per cent of code one cases were responded to in under 15 minutes.

In every year since the Coalition Government was elected in November 2010, the percentage has been in the 70s.

Impossible to compare with pre-2004 data

Victoria has had an ambulance service in one form or another since 1883, but the first motorised services connected by radio to dispatchers didn’t begin until 1954.

In 1983 a Victorian Parliament inquiry into ambulance services found that there was no consistent reporting of ambulance response times across the state.

It recommended that a consistent system of reporting should be established, and that response times should be printed in the annual reports of the various ambulance services.

In a response to a 1997 auditor-general’s report, the then Metropolitan Ambulance Service said: “Response to 90 per cent of all code one cases has been within 15 minutes since March 1997, and within 14 minutes during August and September 1997. This performance is the best achieved since June 1994 (the earliest available comparable data), and is a credit to our staff.”

A report into the rural ambulance services released at the same time said there were no statewide response time records available. Different ambulance services had different benchmarks and kept different records.

In 2010, another auditor-general’s report into access to ambulance services found that in the six years between 2004-05 and 2009-10 ambulance response times had increased.

“The average time AV takes to respond to a code one incident across the state has risen over the past six years… In 2009–10, AV’s average response time was 12.1 minutes, 1.5 minutes higher than the 2004–05 average.”

Fact Check found response times for metropolitan ambulance services included in the Department of Human Services annual reports between 1998-99 and 2003-04. But they are not comparable to the 2004-05 to 2013-14 figures above, because they are metro only and use different response periods.

*within 14 minutes

**within 16 minutes

The verdict

None of the data Fact Check looked at showed a worse percentage of code one response times than the two most recent years, during the Napthine Government.

But based on the available data, there is no way to fairly compare ambulance response times over the 60 years that Victoria has operated ambulances connected by radio dispatchers.

There is no data for the early years, and since the 1980s, response times have been measured in different ways, making a direct comparison impossible.

Mr Andrews’s claim that “ambulances take longer to arrive than ever before” is overreach.

Sources

• Labor Campaign ad
• Ambulance Victoria annual reports 2008/09-2013/14
• History of Ambulance Victoria
• Victorian Public Bodies Review Committee Report on Victoria’s Ambulance Services, 1984
• Victorian Auditor-General’s Special Report Number 50, 1997
• Victorian Auditor-General’s report Access to Ambulance Services, 2010
• Department of Human Services annual reports 1998-99 to 2003-04