Government warned of triple-0 problems years before deaths

Victoria’s Deputy Premier James Merlino was warned in 2016 about serious staff shortages at the state’s triple-zero call agency, more than five years before an explosion of call delays was linked to the deaths of 12 people.

The Age has obtained a letter to Mr Merlino dated December 2016 where unions told the then emergency services minister that ESTA call takers were so overworked they were unable to take proper breaks or access leave, were expected to work overtime and some were suffering from stress and mental health issues.

Deputy Premier James Merlino served as minister for emergency services between Minister for Emergency Services June 2016 and November 2018.Credit:Chris Hopkins

In a separate development, experienced emergency call takers for the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA) told The Age they were reporting call wait times of more than a minute dating back to at least mid-2019, well before the pandemic, and said numerous warnings weren’t acted on.

Ninety per cent of ambulance triple-zero calls and 80 per cent of police calls are meant to be answered within just five seconds.

Unions representing paramedics, firefighters and emergency call takers claimed ESTA had promised 48 new full-time equivalent positions during enterprise bargaining negotiations in 2015, but the pledge for the new operational roles was later withdrawn because the money was no longer available.

“Unfortunately, in what is a bizarre set of circumstances, at our most recent ESTA consultative committee meeting on Tuesday 13 December 2016 ESTA made admissions to the unions that not only were they no longer employing the 48 additional FTE positions promised but that they ‘no longer had the funding’,” the 2016 letter to Mr Merlino said.

In the emailed letter, Mr Merlino was asked to explain why the funding for the new staff had not been allocated and warned that union members were “extremely concerned that the lack of staffing was impacting their ability to best serve the public.” Premier Daniel Andrews was sent a copy of the email.

An Age and 60 Minutes investigation revealed that at least eight adults and four children have died in Victoria since October after calls to triple-zero were never answered or took up to 16 minutes to reach an ESTA operator.

A Victorian government spokeswoman confirmed the 2016 letter from the unions was received, but defended the government’s response to the issue, saying “prior to the Delta and Omicron waves of the pandemic, ESTA was meeting the emergency call taking target of 90 per cent of calls in five seconds each year since 2013”.

“We have given ESTA funding before and throughout the pandemic to help with demand and put on extra resources when they’ve needed it.”

Two experienced call takers said the issue of understaffing had been regularly raised with ESTA management by workers in multiple forums over many years and “regularly dismissed”.

One of the workers, who couldn’t be identified because they still work at ESTA, said they had kept records of call answering delays around May 2019, including waits of more than two minutes to reach ambulance operators and four minutes to reach police.

“At that point we said ‘you’re going to kill someone’. This is not acceptable.

“To blame COVID-19 is disgraceful … COVID has made it busy … but we should be able to ramp up to that and we haven’t been able to because our staffing models were already broken.”

Pictures of wall screen displays from ESTA posted by Ambulance Employees Australia on Facebook as part of their ‘No Call Should Wait’ campaign also in May 2019 showed that at times 10 police calls were taking up to 84 seconds to be answered and five ambulance calls were waiting for up to a minute or more.

Ambulance Employees Australia shared on their Facebook in 2019 images of screens showing numerous police and ambulance calls waiting to be picked up.Credit:Facebook

Since last year, call waits have blown out to more than 30 minutes in some cases and two of the people whose deaths have been linked to extreme triple-zero call answer delays – Preston father Nick Panagiotopoulos and schoolgirl Alisha Hussein – waited around 15 minutes for emergency calls from their loved ones to be answered.

Last week, amid news of more deaths, the Victorian government pledged more than $115 million for the service and 120 new staff, following money for a further 43 new staff made available in last year’s budget.

ESTA’s interim chief executive Stephen Leane, a former senior police officer who was asked to take on the job of fixing the organisation after the departure of Marty Smyth in October last year, says it will take time to turn things around, as they recruit and train new staff.

Sue Riley, now the secretary of the Communications Workers Union in Victoria, was one of the signatories of the December 2016 letter to Mr Merlino when the Deputy Premier served as Victoria’s emergency services minister, a role he held from June 2016 to November 2018.

Ms Riley said in 2014 the union tried to bring about minimum safe staffing levels at ESTA, claiming that there were times when, for example, there were five police call takers looking after the entire state of Victoria – one operator for a million or more people.

But following protracted industrial action, she said they eventually agreed with ESTA management that it would bring in 48 new full-time equivalent staff. She said union officials were later shocked to discover that the promised workers, which had been announced to ESTA staff in an email and described as a “necessity”, were no longer being employed.

“It was kind of accidentally revealed to us in a meeting. We sort of stopped the meeting and said ‘what’?

“All we got really was an apology.”

The number of full-time call takers and dispatchers at ESTA has increased by an average of 15 staff a year since 2016. ESTA says it has increased its ambulance call taking and dispatch workforce by the equivalent of about 30 full-time staff since the start of the pandemic, despite recruitment challenges at this time.

Data obtained by The Age shows between late September and mid-December there were more than 40,000 triple-zero ambulance calls delayed and waiting at least a minute to be connected.

Victoria Ambulance Union secretary Danny Hill said if safe minimum staffing arrangements had been introduced, the extreme delays now being reported out of ESTA would have been prevented.

“Any of those things have just been shut down every time we’ve sort of brought them forward,” he said.

“No government likes to be tied to recruitment numbers in enterprise bargaining, which I think is quite short-sighted because you’re much better off having steady consistent growth to avoid getting into crisis, rather than waiting till you get to a number where you have to pull in an extra 120 staff in one hit.”

The promised new workers were announced to ESTA staff in a July 2015 email titled “Good News”. The staff were to include 22 operational full-time equivalent staff for police, 14 for fire and 12 for ambulance.

“This news means more hands on deck, something we all agree is a current priority and necessity, particularly as we address the increasing demand on the Triple Zero service from the Victorian public,” the email said.

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