Authorities are investigating the death of a man who waited more than three hours on an ambulance stretcher for treatment at a regional hospital in the Australian state of Victoria.
The 72-year-old man went into cardiac arrest and died on Monday afternoon after waiting about three-and-a-half hours for treatment at the Bairnsdale Regional Health Service in East Gippsland.
The Guardian Australia understands the man had been taken out of the ambulance and into the hospital at the time of his death.
He was considered a low-acuity case, but his condition deteriorated as he was left waiting in a corridor for a bed to become available in the emergency department.
Bairnsdale Regional Health Service and Ambulance Victoria are conducting an investigation into the death.
Victoria Minister for Police Lisa Neville said staff shortages due to COVID-19 have left the state’s health system “under huge pressure.”
About 1,700 health workers were isolating on Tuesday, either having tested positive for the virus or as a close contact of an infected person, she said.
“We also have had a number of staff who have left the service just because of the last couple of years,” Neville said.
“We’re very conscious that our regional and rural hospitals are as under pressure as our metropolitan hospitals. We’ll have this investigation, but we’ll continue to support investment in rural and regional hospitals to make sure that people get the care that they’re entitled to,” she said.
Lawmaker Tim Bull, who represents East Gippsland, said about 10 percent of staff at Bairnsdale hospital were off work due to COVID-19 at the time of the man’s death.
“I know many people who work at the hospital, I know the sort of hours they’ve been working, the stress they’re dealing with and the strict framework of rules they’ve diligently navigated for more than two years — they’re our local heroes,” the Nationals lawmaker said.
“But they can only do so much when the rural health workforce is so underprepared and underresourced by state Labor — even before the massive strain and uncertainty of the pandemic,” he said. “They are just overwhelmed at the moment. Now we’ve got a local family in mourning.”
Victorian Ambulance Union secretary Danny Hill said increased presentations at emergency departments across the state have meant ambulances are forced to wait — or “ramp” — outside hospitals for long periods of time with patients on board.
“There’s ramping every single shift. There is no location where there isn’t ramping happening at some point over the last couple of months,” he said.
Hill said most paramedics were treating patients who had deferred seeing their general practitioner or having regular checkups during lockdowns and are now experiencing more complex or critical problems.
“They’re waiting until they’re critically unwell and then dialing triple zero. It puts much more strain on the system. People who see their doctor regularly probably don’t need an ambulance,” he said.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RELATIONS: Cultural spats, such as China’s claims over the origins of kimchi, have soured public opinion in South Korea against Beijing over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday met South Korean counterpart Lee Jae-myung, after taking center stage at an Asian summit in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s departure. The talks on the sidelines of the APEC gathering came the final day of Xi’s first trip to South Korea in more than a decade, and a day after his meeting with the Canadian prime minister that was a reset of the nations’ damaged ties. Trump had flown to South Korea for the summit, but promptly jetted home on Thursday after sealing a trade war pause with Xi, with the two
RSS