By Eleanor Wilson
Ambulance services in the South East appear to be more stretched than ever, amid claims an elderly woman was left waiting several hours for an ambulance after she fell down a set of stairs at Village Cinemas in Fountain Gate Shopping Centre on Tuesday 24 May.
Bystander Rhondda Strafford said she went to the cinema with her husband on Tuesday afternoon when she noticed a woman was being tended to by passers-by.
“She was conscious and sitting up and it looked like they had an ice pack on her neck or something,” Mrs Strafford said.
Upon leaving the movie session approximately two hours later, Mrs Strafford said the woman remained in the same position.
“Nothing had changed and I just felt so sorry for her,” Mrs Strafford said.
“You sort of, in naivety, think if something happens you ring an ambulance and you’ll get seen to, but obviously at the moment this is not the case.”
The woman’s daughter confirmed to Star News her mother, who is nearly 80 years old, missed the last few steps of the stairs, sustaining a fracture on her cheek, laceration to her eye socket and severe bruising to her clavicle, shoulder, femur and fibula.
Despite Village Cinema staff and family members ringing an ambulance several times, the woman, who would like to remain anonymous, remained at the base of the stairs for four hours.
The woman’s daughter said Village staff were “incredible” during this time, providing the woman with pillows, blankets and attending to her cuts.
With the woman’s condition deteriorating, at 7:30pm her son and daughter-in-law, who work as a nurse and hospital consultant respectively, assessed the woman to ensure she hadn’t broken her neck, before deciding to drive her to the hospital.
“She could’ve had a bleed on her brain…we really didn’t know but we felt we had no choice but to drive her because she was in a lot of pain and we had no idea when an ambulance would arrive,” the woman’s daughter said.
The elderly woman faced an additional 10 hour wait at two separate South east hospitals, with her daughter claiming she did not receive treatment until 5:30 the next morning – 14 hours after she sustained the injury.
“Honestly its not [the paramedic’s] fault, but something needs to be fixed, it is a broken system,” the woman’s daughter said.
“I just feel for anyone in that position, it’s just horrible seeing someone you love in pain like that.”
In a statement, Ambulance Victoria confirmed paramedics were called to an incident at Narre Warren on Tuesday afternoon.
“We take seriously our commitment to providing the best care for every patient, and understand that the time waiting would have been frustrating for those at the scene,” an Ambulance Victoria spokesperson said.
“Ambulance resources are allocated based on clinical need and prioritised to the sickest patients, particularly those with life-threatening conditions.”
The elderly woman spent several days in hospital recovering from the fall and will be dependent on a walking frame for the next few weeks.
She has also tested positive for Covid, which her daughter believes she may have contracted after waiting for hours in the emergency department alongside other sick patients.
The claims add to an increasing emergency care crisis throughout the state, which has recorded consistently long wait times for ambulances and at hospital emergency departments in recent months.
A recent review by former chief commissioner Graham Ashton found since October at least 15 Victorians, including children, have died while waiting for an ambulance.
On Thursday night Victorian ambulance services were forced to call a ‘code red’ after it was faced with extreme demand, with a backlog of as many as 70 patients at one point in the night.
The code red was called around 1am on Friday 27 May, coinciding with a technological crash of the CAD (computer aided dispatch) system which made allocating ambulances even more difficult.
In metropolitan Melbourne, patients were told not to call an ambulance unless it was an emergency.
