Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak today about the grave concerns in the greater Frankston-Mornington Peninsula area about proposed changes to our emergency health support system, and I refer specifically to the dual-person MICA unit that covers the greater Frankston-Mornington Peninsula area. Most Victorians would know that this is a vast area, an area of extreme growth in population. Over summer, there is an influx of tens of thousands of people from the greater Melbourne area and beyond.

What we have seen is a welcome announcement by the Brumby government of additional money for ambulance services. But embedded within this announcement—which should be good news for our community, which needs improvements in its ambulance service—is a plan to strip the area of its highly valued MICA 6 paramedic dual-person unit, which operates a stretcher-bearing vehicle that can attend trauma victims, car accidents and heart attack victims, some of the most demanding medical circumstances on the peninsula, which, as I have mentioned, is a vast and growing region.

The plan is to replace that two-person MICA ambulance with a single operator MICA paramedic in a sedan. I understand that in some parts of the world that may be an attractive pathway. There is some belief that, if there is a critical incident that requires a stretcher bearer vehicle or additional MICA or paramedic support, a second vehicle may arrive to attend. What we know on the Mornington Peninsula is that with our vast area the likelihood of that coincidence of availability is not great. So concerning is this move that the whole community has risen up to raise this issue with the state government.

We are pleased that there has been a reprieve, borne out of an inability to recruit personnel to operate this new format—this ‘reconfiguration’ as it is being described. I hope this reprieve gives the state government, and in particular the ambulance service and the health minister, a chance to revisit this topic. How often do you see a community rise up to take out a petition on ‘Save MICA 6’ outlining the grave concerns they have? How often do you see victims such as Kevin Grahame, who is reported in the newspaper as saying that, if it were not for the dual-paramedic layout, he would not be with us now, he would not have survived? His wife speaks very warmly of that dual-composition team. How often do you see the paramedics themselves plead with the minister to revisit the subject? So concerned are they, based on their professional experience. And how often do you see wall-to-wall clinicians in a regional area, ranging from health professionals, specialists and even local hospitals, all saying that it is a bad decision—a retrograde step at a time when the state government is claiming it is putting in more resources? We must keep the MICA 6 dual-person unit on the peninsula. (Time expired)