Tuesday, 20 June 2023

Non-emergency patient transfer services

Bill TILLEY (Benambra) (19:11): (225) I wish to raise a matter for the attention of the Minister for Health. The action I seek is for the minister to commit to opening up the tendering process for non-emergency patient transport as administered by HealthShare Victoria, which falls under the Minister for Health’s responsibility. For those that are unaware, the NEPT sector are the ambulance transports you need when you do not really need an ambulance. The operators are medically trained, and the vehicles are for all intents and purposes an ambulance, but the primary responsibility here is to act as a pressure valve on 000 ambulances – the lights and bells ‘save your life’ sort of ambulance. Non-emergency patient transfers shuffle low-acuity patients to and from hospitals, to rehab and recovery centres. They free up hospital beds and the bed blockage by taking patients home and most importantly save the lights and bells ambos for saving lives.

On 14 April this year the Minister for Ambulance Services talked up the NEPT as a critical feature of the health system. So it seems almost unbelievable that since 2015, HealthShare Victoria has not seen fit to tender these services – just the same contracts rolled over and over and now extending through to 2028. That is 13 years without testing the market. HealthShare Victoria’s policy talks about procurement processes needing to support fairness, transparency, probity, security, confidentiality and value for money. How could they possibly know when the market has not been tested for almost a decade? You do not have to be Sherlock Holmes when you see where the market has not been tested, and certainly there are games afoot here in these circumstances.

Those in the industry fear the stalling is part of larger plot. They believe the current review is a sham with a predetermined outcome, one that has already seen the Premier drop sound bites badmouthing the sector as not value for money – remember that has not been tested since 2015 – and one that is following the blueprint of a hostile takeover not unlike the CFA. They want to get it out of the private sector and put it under the banner of Ambulance Victoria. This is just another example of the socialist paradigm – the tarring and feathering of small business as a pariah on society and the contest between ideology and reality.

Regional areas will be the hardest hit, and I am hearing the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which provides NEPT services in the Benambra district, is likely to withdraw next month. The bush telegraph tells me that the writing is on the wall and the review is just a paper trail to getting rid of private providers. In the interim, without exploring what other opportunities exist, Ambulance Victoria paramedics will be taken off life-threatening emergency responses and onto the shuffling of non-urgent patients. This is in a climate where we have two shires in Benambra district among the worst for ambulance wait times in the state.