“Your ankle has hurt for months, what brought you in today?”

“It’s quiet on Sundays.”

The instant dismay of seeing a well person in emergency is somewhat offset by her disarming honesty. She is poor, ill-supported and not sure what symptoms to report where. In the corridors of disadvantage where I work, this is typical.

“What made you call an ambulance?”

“So they’d see me quickly.”

Now, I am irked.

Next door is a young man with brittle asthma whose condition lands him in hospital every year. His mother says the ambulance used to arrive quickly but now when they call, her heart is in her mouth. It’s hard to believe her son who follows every advice could yet be the casualty of an ambulance delay.

A lot of my time is spent inside the hospital where help is one call away. But outside this privileged environment, when a medical disaster unfolds, the surest sign of reassurance for me is the sight of an ambulance. Paramedics act quickly and methodically. They treat the injury while thinking ahead about what could go wrong. I have watched them with my own family and marvelled at their skills.

Anyone experiencing an emergency deserves the same meticulous care but only if we treat the ambulance service with equal care.

In Australia, an ambulance attends an incident more than 5 million times a year. Incidents are prioritised as emergency (lights and sirens), urgent, non-emergency and emergency room attendance.

In 2021-22, 42% of calls were considered an emergency, a further 32% as urgent, but a quarter of........

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