The Napthine Government has taken $826 million form the Victorian health budget and the consequences are starting to reveal themselves in the quality of health care that Victorians are getting in our hospitals and in transit to our hospitals via the ambulance service.

I would like to acknowledge the amazing job done by our paramedics on a day to day basis during very difficult times. However despite the paramedics best efforts, Ambulance Victoria is in crisis across Melbourne and across regional Victoria.

People are waiting longer and disturbingly some people are missing out.  Too often we are hearing of someone who waited in pain for too long for an ambulance to arrive. There are delays in patient handovers and there are ambulances ramped up at hospitals all over the state.  In towns such as Avoca and Maryborough they have only one ambulance, often diversions are occurring because hospitals in these areas do not have the capacity to take on patients. These areas are often left uncovered for hours and hour at a time, and it is simply not good enough.

The last set of figures, made publicly available by the Opposition, show that just one in four branches in regional and rural Victoria achieved the state-wide benchmark for life-threatening call-outs in the second half of 2012.

The government has a moral responsibility to provide emergency health care for Victorians. It is what Victorians expect from government and the Napthine Government is failing to deliver this most essential service.