Northern Victoria Region
Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (14:13): (533) My question is for the Minister for Emergency Services. On Wednesday 25 October the Rural Ambulance Victoria Network radio system used by ESTA to communicate with paramedic crews failed in the Shepparton and Bendigo areas for several hours. During this time paramedics could not use radio communication to reply to or update the control centre. In emergencies, seconds save lives, but during this outage paramedics were forced to dial in from mobile phones, adding significant delay to all communication. An update of the RAVNet system is scheduled for next year, but it is long overdue. Minister, given this latest failure, will you now bring forward the RAVNet upgrade?