A third South Australian resident has died within two days while waiting for paramedics to respond to calls for help.
The Ambulance Employees Association of South Australia (AEA) revealed on Wednesday morning that a man in his 50s has died overnight after he waited about two hours for an ambulance.
The call for help was made at about 11pm on Tuesday night after the patient had fallen and was semiconscious.
Despite the priority 2 case needing to be attended to within 16 minutes, the SA Ambulance Service received a second call two hours later with reports the man was unconscious and not breathing.
After being upgraded to a priorixjmtzywty 1 case, the union claimed an ambulance needed to respond within eight minutes but when crews arrived nine minutes later they were unable to resuscitate the patient.
“Crews, and Communications staff are utterly devastated,” the AEA said.
“To the question in all of our minds: ‘how many more people have to die before Premier Marshall will do anything other than apologise’, the answer must be … ‘A few more’.”
It was only 24 hours ago that reports were made of a person aged in their 20s and a 94-year-old woman also died in separate incidents while they each waited longer than 45 minutes for an ambulance.
Last week two other patients died before paramedics could respond.
Premier Steven Marshall again expressed condolences to the patient's family but said a review into the death needed to be done.
“We can't just take the union’s word for it. We know the type of campaign they’re running at the moment,” he said.
“We don't have anything that suggests that the time delay was the cause of death in this circumstance.”
