19 May 2021
Two medical incidents in Whyalla on the weekend have completely underscored the health system’s alarming decline into inertia.
The parents of a 14-year-old boy who collapsed unconscious at home were forced to drive him to hospital themselves because no ambulances were available. The child was then forced to wait for 45 minutes in the waiting room as there were no staff to triage.
On the same day, Sunday, ramping was so chronic in Whyalla that an SAAS crew had to be sent from Port Augusta for the 80km drive to Whyalla to transfer a man suffering from a seizure to the Whyalla ED.
It is understood the boy was initially triaged as a Category 1 emergency, the most urgent, requiring an ambulance to arrive within eight minutes. Instead, there were none.
In the second case, what should have been a 16-minute response time blew out to 80 minutes.
“These are nightmare scenarios where a lack of ambulance crews and long wait times could have resulted in tragic outcomes,’’ said ANMF (SA Branch) CEO/Secretary Adj Associate Professor Elizabeth Dabars AM.
“Never before has the health system, now so chronically ill itself, been so ill-equipped and under-resourced to respond to matters of life and death.
“If this doesn’t prompt the Marshall Government to act quickly to shore up a failing system then we fear it will inevitably take someone’s preventable death before our politicians and bureaucrats are shamed into action.
“Never before has our hospital system been so overcapacity and so understaffed that it has become a clear and present danger to the very community it is supposed to protect.’’