11 February 2025

Providing timely access to quality care to patients and consumers is everyone’s job at Austin Health. It is at the centre of everything we do.

Today we are thrilled to join Minister for Health Mary-Anne Thomas launch the Standards for Safe and Timely Ambulance and Emergency Care for Victorians, to help improve patient flow and reduce pressure on health services.

Austin Health was one of the services that were involved in developing the standards, which are based on how staff work at our service.

As a statewide leader, we have successfully and consistently improved emergency department and ambulance patient handover times in recent years.

Austin Health CEO (Interim) Mr Cameron Goodyear said that prioritising this work across the entire health service has helped deliver fantastic outcomes for the whole community.

‘No matter what kind of role someone has, everyone at Austin Health has an important role to play in contributing to access to quality care.

‘We are incredibly proud of the work that has significantly improved ambulance transfer times – and importantly, helped get more ambulances back out into the community, quicker.

‘In collaboration with the Department of Health and other services, we’ve been able to build on what we have learned at our service and contributed to these statewide standards, which is great for patients’ said Mr Goodyear.

A quest for better patient flow has resulted in huge improvements:

• In quarter 2, 2024-25: 73% of ambulance arrivals to Austin Health were offloaded within 40 minutes, compared to 57% during the same period last year.
• During quarter 2 2024-25, around 22,100 patients presented to the Austin’s emergency department with over 5,800 arriving via ambulance.

This ambulance transfer improvement was achieved with the leadership and expertise of staff across Austin Health, who were empowered to identify and implement improvement solutions to their local areas, which together have created significant improvements.