An 88-year-old man has died after spending up to eight hours on a trolley in a Geelong hospital corridor. Just two days earlier, an 81-year-old grandmother lay in agony on the floor of her Grovedale home for two and a half hours waiting for a paramedic — while the nearest hospital was 15 minutes away.
These are not aberrations. They are the predictable outcomes of a Victorian health system that has been mismanaged for years under the Andrews and Allan Labor governments. Family First Legislative Council candidates Jane Foreman, Dianne Colbert and Matt Emerson have had enough.
Ambulance Victoria’s most recent performance reports show that in Quarter 3 of 2025/26, only 65.6 per cent of Code 1 cases were reached within 15 minutes statewide. Results far below Ambulance Victoria’s official statewide target of 85 per cent.
In larger population centres, where the official target is 90 per cent of Code 1 cases within 15 minutes, performance was just 70.6 per cent in Quarter 3. That means nearly 3 in 10 urgent cases in major Victorian communities still did not receive an ambulance within the benchmark in the first three months of 2026.
When crews are stuck ramping outside hospital, ambulances are unavailable for the next emergency call. That’s exactly what happened in Geelong. At around 1am on 26 June, more than a dozen ambulance crews were ramped outside University Hospital Geelong. Some emergency patients waited two and a half hours. There were no local crews to respond to other calls in the region.
“Victorians deserve to know that when they call 000, help will arrive quickly,” Ms Foreman said. “But the figures show the system is still failing that basic test.”
Family First calls on the Allan Labor Government to answer why, more than four years after the pandemic, does Victoria still fall nearly 13 percentage points short of its own five-year-old ambulance transfer target?
“These are not acceptable figures,” Ms Colbert said. “When a person is struggling to breathe, suffering chest pain, or facing another critical emergency, a system that misses its own targets this badly is a system that is putting lives at risk.”
“Paramedics are doing extraordinary work, but they are being trapped in a broken system,” Mr Emerson said. “Ambulances cannot respond to the next emergency if they are stuck ramped outside hospitals.”
Family First Victoria is calling for:
- Immediate action to reduce ambulance ramping and hospital transfer delays.
- A clear public recovery plan to lift Code 1 response performance toward the 85 per cent statewide target and 90 per cent target in larger centres.
- Targeted resourcing for growth corridors and outer suburban communities where response times remain especially poor.
- Honest public reporting so Victorians can see whether performance is genuinely improving.
“Victorian families should not be left wondering whether help will arrive in time,” Ms Foreman said. “Family First will continue to demand practical action so patients come before bureaucracy and political spin.”
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