Big rise in emergency rescues
The number of ambulance callouts in Perth climbed to almost 200,000 in the past year, matched by a surge in patients treated by the emergency rescue helicopter.
St John Ambulance's 2013-14 annual report shows greater demand for services. Ambulances attended to 255,274 people in WA - 199,294 in Perth, 2.5 per cent more than in the previous year.
The number of helicopter missions was 604, up 28 per cent on the previous year, with 370 patients treated and transported by critical care paramedics using the RAC emergency rescue helicopter service, up from 297 in 2012-13. Country ambulance activity rose 6.7 per cent, with more than 55,000 cases handled.
SJA chief executive Tony Ahern said despite the increased need for services, response times across the three priority calls had improved and were better than the targets set by a contract with the Health Department.
With priority one calls, 93.2 per cent were handled within 15 minutes, up from 92.3 per cent the previous year, while 92.6 per cent of priority three calls were responded to within 25 minutes, better than the 92.1 per cent in 2012-13.
"Not only did we have more ambulance attendances, but our response times improved for all our incident categories, covering emergency to non-urgent," Mr Ahern said.
"St John must reach 90 per cent of all jobs in a specified time frame and not only did we meet and better these targets, we had the fourth consecutive year of response-time improvement."
The State Operations Centre took more than 496,000 calls, with 178,226 classified as emergencies - a 3.6 per cent rise on the previous year.
The overall number of calls handled by the centre was down from the 507,200 recorded in the previous year, but SJA said the decrease was because a standalone patient transfer service was set up in January to provide non-emergency transport.
Mr Ahern said the new division allowed for a better use of ambulance resources and provided an easier way for hospitals and other agencies to organise non-emergency transport.
He said St John trained more than 220,000 people in first aid in the past year.
