Paramedics unable to respond to 'lights and sirens' cases while ramped

Frontline paramedics have laid bare Queensland's ambulance ramping crisis, spending entire 12-hour shifts with patients stuck outside overcrowded public hospital emergency departments, unable to respond to "lights and sirens" cases in the community.

They have vented their frustration to ABC News at being unable to offload patients to emergency departments within the recommended 30 minutes, while potentially life-threatening cases can languish for hours just waiting for an ambulance.

It comes as an investigation is underway into the case of a 51-year-old man, with chest pains, living just a few streets away from Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane's south, who paramedics found dead about two hours after he called Triple Zero (000) last weekend.

At the halfway mark of the Crisafulli Government's first-term, paramedics have shared videos and photos showing row upon row of ambulances parked outside hospitals to highlight the extent of the crisis.

The latest data for August shows that across Queensland's top 26 public hospitals, 42 per cent of ambulance patients wait more than 30 minutes before they can be transferred off stretcher into the care of the emergency department — a practice known as ramping.

That is only slightly better than the 43.9 per cent figure in the August before the LNP Government was elected in October 2024.

But a deep dive into the new ambulance ramping data shows some key public hospitals are faring significantly worse under the Crisafulli Government, which pledged to cut statewide ramping to under 30 per cent by the 2028 state poll.

They include Cairns, Mackay, Gladstone, Caboolture, Toowoomba, The Prince Charles Hospital, and the Sunshine Coast University Hospital.

The worst hospitals in the state are in the Metro South region, where at Logan, Redland and the QEII hospitals, more than 60 per cent of patients arriving by ambulance were ramped for more than half an hour in August.

QEII had the highest Queensland ramping rates for the month at 64.8 per cent.

'System that's not working well'

Metro South is the health region which services Annerley, the suburb where the man was found dead, alone at home, by paramedics, about two hours after calling Triple Zero last Saturday night.

His family only found out about the ambulance delay through media reports on Thursday.

United Workers Union state secretary Fiona Scalon said Metro South hospitals had been ambulance ramping "hot spots" in recent months.

"For our members, who are paramedics in the field, it's kind of demoralising for them to be sitting at a hospital with the care of a patient when they should be out in the community dealing with people in need who haven't been assessed yet.

"It's common knowledge that the longer someone waits to receive treatment, if they're in need, the more drastic the implications could be. It's not good to have people waiting for that care."

A Metro South-based paramedic, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he sometimes worked entire shifts of 10 or 12 hours where he would spend his working day ramped with one patient at a hospital.

"That does occur not too infrequently," he said.

"You'll hear the workload in the community is very high. It just means we know there's people out there who genuinely need an ambulance critically and they are not receiving that care. That's one of the biggest frustrations."

On the day the ABC spoke to this paramedic, he was ramped with a patient at Logan Hospital, south of Brisbane, for five hours.

Speaking before the Annerley man's death, he said there were instances where Code 1 "lights and sirens response" cases waited two or three hours in the community before paramedics could get to them.

His comments were echoed by a paramedic based in the Metro North region.

"Some people spend their whole shift on the ramp," he said.

"There are some patients that are quite abusive towards us."

In a response to questions about response times, the Queensland Ambulance Service said: "While we are the busiest ambulance service in the country and getting busier, we have improved response times to the most critically ill patients in the past year.

"We acknowledge the concerns of our paramedics that stem from increasing demand on the health system."

Government remains hopeful

In an exclusive interview with the Health Minister, Mr Nicholls refused to concede getting statewide ambulance ramping below 30 per cent by the October 2028 was impossible, despite record numbers of people attending Queensland emergency departments, the aging population and soaring levels of chronic disease.

"It's much higher than we'd like. There's more work to be done but the trend is showing that we are having an impact.

"So we keep working at it."

Asked whether he would resign from Cabinet if he failed to reach the premier's target, he said: "Let's see how we go first. Time will tell, but we are working like fury to do it."

Mr Nicholls said the Federal Government also needed to do its bit, given 1,400 patients in Queensland public hospitals were waiting for an aged care placement or National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) support.

"The federal government's failing to provide the aged care and the NDIS care that those Australians need," he said.

"If we got just 200 of those beds back, we would see the ramping numbers improve dramatically, because we would have beds in the hospital to move people out of the emergency department.

"That would enable us to then take people out of the ambulances and get those ambulances back on the street. That's why, across the nation, state and territory health ministers have called on the federal government to invest in aged care to take the burden off our hospital system. And it's a big burden."

Freeing up more hospital beds would also take stress off health workers.

Toowoomba-based emergency physician Justin Thompson, speaking in his capacity as Queensland chair of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said staff burnout was on the rise alongside overcrowded emergency departments and "increasing levels of occupational violence" in hospitals.

"The main thing that we need going forward from the state is increasing our acute hospital bed capacity," Dr Thompson said.

In the meantime, as new hospitals are built and others are expanded, he called for access to more diagnostic equipment and to allied health staff over a seven-day week, rather than just during business hours, to help speed up patient discharge and free beds.

Before the 2024 poll, Queensland Premier David Crisafulli also pledged to provide real-time hospital data in the first 100 days.

He fulfilled that promise in February last year.

The Open Hospitals real-time data website shows median waiting times, as well as the number of patients, waiting for "meaningful treatment" to start, at 25 major hospital emergency departments and seven satellite health centres.

In response to a series of questions, Queensland Health said the Open Hospitals website "is improving transparency and accountability across the health system to ensure Queenslanders get the care they need when they need it".

"It has had over one million hits since its launch," a spokesperson said.

But the department did not answer questions asking for the numbers of people accessing the site each month since it went live.

Bundaberg patient advocate Beryl Crosby, who has assessed the data in real time with patients inside her local hospital's emergency department, described the site as "useless" and "false".

"It isn't real-time data that is meaningful to any patient," she said. "I don't think it's even meaningful to anybody in the hospital.

"I think people gave up on it a long time ago."

Ms Crosby said the site could flag a median 30 minute or one-hour wait in an emergency department, and people could actually be there for hours before they were discharged or admitted to a hospital bed.

She blamed a lack of beds at the hospital on bad planning, not the "amazing" hospital staff, who she said were "trying to do their best" with what they had.