THE State Government came under fire this week after news broke of an expensive charge being levied on sick patients while they lay on stretchers inside the emergency departments of regional hospitals.
State Opposition Parliamentary Secretary Wade Noonan said the “secret charge” of $12 per minute applied to patients who did not have ambulance cover when ambulances were forced to “ramp up” outside rural and regional hospitals which “simply don’t have a bed for them”.
Mr Noonan told The Express ramping had increased fourfold at Latrobe Regional Hospital, according to data obtained under Freedom of Information covering a six-month period through to 31 December 2012.
He said they now spent, on average, 198 hours per month ramped at LRH, which meant “more people will now start to be seeing larger dollar figures on ambulance invoices if they are not (Ambulance Victoria) members”.
Calling that component of the overall ambulance charge “quite scandalous”, Mr Noonan said country patients were mostly unaware they were “paying for the privilege” of being ramped and waiting for an emergency department bed.
“It’s a complete double whammy… there’s nothing you can do about being ramped and yet patients have a very poor understanding of having to pay for it,” he said.
While Ambulance Victoria pointed out it offered free ambulance transports to low income Victorians under the government’s concessions program, and low-cost subscriptions to others, Mr Noonan said “it is still a cost and people make decisions about day to day living priorities and this may be too much for them”.
AV chief financial officer Taryn Rulton said AV memberships cost less than 25 cents a day for a family and provided “100 per cent coverage for emergency and medically approved non-emergency treatment and transports across Australia”.
She said fees were set by the Department of Health under the Ambulance Services Act 1986.
“Patients in rural areas are charged for the time that our services are dedicated to their care,” Ms Rulton said.
“This includes the time that the ambulance and paramedics involved are unable to respond to other members of the community.
“We regularly take into account individual circumstances and will work with patients to devise repayment plans.”
Australasian College for Emergency Medicine spokesperson Dr Simon Judkins said it needed to be “made clear” the main reason for ambulance ramping “and the extensively long wait times experienced by many patients” remained the “lack of available beds in hospitals”.
A spokesperson for State Health Minister David Davis told The Express a review of the AV fee structure had been underway, between various stakeholders, for several months.
