MORNINGTON’S Main St ambulance station will get a $1.4 million upgrade and a new “super response centre” will be built under a $500 million plan to improve the Mornington Peninsula’s ambulance response times.
The upgrade is part of a five-year plan which will see Mornington’s station get a new ambulance and be manned round the clock by 14 full-time paramedics.
Ambulance response times on the peninsula have been some of the worst in the metropolitan region, with ambulances meeting the government benchmark of 15 minutes in just 71.7 per cent of cases in 2014, according to the Victorian auditor general’s report.
Ambulance Employees Australia Victoria union secretary Steve McGhie said those times had improved in the past two years, with peninsula ambulances now meeting response times 76 per cent of the time.
Mr McGhie said the new station was a welcome addition to the “much-needed” resources in the south east, and should go a long way toward further reducing response times.
He said the re-coding of calls in recent month to reduce the number of ambulances being sent to non-urgent cases was also improving ambulance service on the peninsula.
“There has been a lot of work done this year to make the system work better,” he said.
Ambulance Victoria Metro East regional director Cath Anderson said the average Code 1 response time on the peninsula was 12.36 minutes in the September quarter, an improvement on the 13.26 minutes this time last year.
Frankston MP Paul Edbrooke said the south-eastern “super centre” and the peninsula’s new ambulance station was about putting patients first and giving paramedics the support they need to save lives.
First published in the Mornington News – 6 December 2016
