Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): I'd like to talk about ambulance wait times particularly in rural electorates. Emergency workers talk about the golden hour" which is the critical time between when someone has an accident or gets injured and when they can receive medical treatment and that is the hour that makes the difference often between life or death. We've had a lot of press lately in the Otago Daily Times and I've had people come to me as their MP saying that they've had accidents they've been waiting for up to 2½ hours sometimes ambulances don't come and in 2013 in my electorate of Taieri—in Kaitangita which is a rural area—we had a 69-year-old woman who died waiting for an ambulance for more than an hour and a half for a 12-minute ride. So that's causing a great deal of anxiety in my electorate. It is characterised by the fact we have a lot of seniors and a lot of disabled people. In fact the first petition that I received for this House was from a constituent from Mosgiel called Pauline Latta and she had had it signed by more than 50000 people calling for full funding for St John Ambulance. Now I commended that petition to the House not because I agree that St John should be fully funded—I don't think that's the answer—but I do think that it drew attention to the issue of rural ambulance services and wait times. They're not isolated incidents; they're becoming more and more frequent. Just recently a 91-year-old Balclutha woman was left lying in her garden after she cut herself. After numerous calls to the emergency services she ended up having the police come and take her to a medical centre. And so that's really stressful not only for her but for others who might find themselves in the same situation. Now some people are saying that double-crewing and changes to St John crewing is the problem. In fact I agree with the double-crewing changes which mean that emergency workers go out in pairs. We've heard that it's best practice and that it's needed for safety but it does have implications and it's a bit complicated when it comes to crewing because you've got paid workers and you've got volunteer workers and now you've got the requirement for double crews. To cut a long story short what that has meant in my electorate is changes to Milton Balclutha and Lawrence. The very small community of Lawrence is feeling really anxious and undervalued because it fears it may lose its station Balclutha has got changes to crewing and in Milton the changes have led to a petition signed by about 3500 people which is a lot of people for a really small rural town. The scenario that could play out is for example if the two Balclutha ambulances were tied up on other calls it could conceivably mean a six-hour round trip to get someone say from a road accident to Dunedin Hospital or it could be that a volunteer may not be able to administer pain relief—although I know St John are working on upskilling their volunteers—and as I said it could mean that small stations like Lawrence would close. So the reason for this pressure is there are more calls on St John. I'm told by St John that they dispatch 440000 ambulances per year and that that is increasing 3 percent per year annually and I think that those reasons are also because of the stress on our primary healthcare system. So what is happening—and I've spoken to ambulance officers about this—is that sometimes they're tying up emergency services by sending ambulances to people who have not been able to get on to a waiting list to see a doctor or it's taking five or six weeks and so they end up going in an ambulance to the emergency department. Or they've had a condition which was not an emergency it didn't get medical attention in time it has become an emergency and so they need to rush to hospital.So what are the solutions? Well I don't think full funding is a solution. I can say that we have already increased funding to St John. So they're paid 72 percent by the Ministry of Health and ACC and that was increased in 2020 to $46.36 million over four years. But I do think there's an appetite out there for some more funding to assist to get more paid staff and I certainly know that we discussed this at the Labour conference last year. What I would like to see as the MP for a mixed rural and urban area is a bigger nuance in how we deal with ambulance services and in fact all medical services for our rural areas. I'm delighted that our Minister of Health is pushing forward urgently the health reforms and I just want to make sure that those communities—seniors disabled and rural communities—get their voices heard in this debate."