Tasmanians are being forced to wait in agony for hours while ambulances are stuck on hospital ramps according to the paramedics union. It claims no ambulances in the state's south were available to respond to call outs yesterday afternoon because half the fleet was waiting to offload patients at the royal Hobart hospital.
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TVTranscript
00:00 Alex Krasnicki broke his ankle on Friday night.
00:05 In pain, he lay in his front yard for four hours before an ambulance arrived.
00:11 It felt forever, just because of all the pain that I was obviously having.
00:16 So I was just laying there.
00:17 Luckily, my family got some blankets for me and put a pillow under my head so I wasn't
00:22 cold, but the pain was very immense.
00:25 The ambulance union says a paramedic shortage and a worsening ramping problem is to blame.
00:31 At half past four yesterday afternoon, nine of the 18 ambulances in the state's south
00:37 were ramped at the Royal Hobart Hospital.
00:39 Another nine were on jobs.
00:41 The union says that left no ambulances available to respond to an emergency.
00:46 It was an unsafe time for all Tasmanians and just shows how dire our health system is.
00:52 As I say, we're continuing to employ more paramedics to build more facilities to deliver
00:58 better health care right around Tasmania.
01:01 The health department says demand for ambulances increases during the summer holiday period
01:06 and it's working on a new policy to let paramedics hand over their patients to hospital staff
01:11 within an hour of arriving.
01:13 But doctors say that can only work if emergency beds aren't already full.
01:18 The simple challenge you have at the moment is that when there is no capacity to accept
01:21 those patients, effectively you're transferring that risk from the ambulance service to the
01:26 public hospitals to how you provide that care.
01:29 Unions and health stakeholders say emergency department congestion is a complex issue to
01:34 solve.
01:35 They're calling for a funding injection to deliver better GP availability and ensure
01:40 less urgent patients can get care outside of hospitals.
01:45 Let's have an honest conversation about if we're going to fund it and if we're not going
01:49 to fund it, let's tell the public what the public health system is not going to fund
01:52 and what you're going to have to self-fund.
01:53 They say better collaboration will cut wait times for patients like Mr Krasnicki.
01:59 [BLANK_AUDIO]