Leaked memo tells hospital staff to ramp QAS trolleys outside as EDs strain

The memorandum, sent to emergency department staff in September last year under the subject line “QAS ramping in acute”, said that at times of high Queensland Ambulance Service demand and triage crowding there is pressure to ramp trolleys and staff in the acute area. The union called the practice unacceptable. The memorandum instructed that QAS trolleys “are to be ramped outside the department until room becomes available in the triage area, but they are not to remain in vehicles”. Staff who were pressured by paramedics to ramp in the acute area were to “escalate this immediately” with managers.

Ramping refers to delays of more than 30 minutes to transfer patients from the care of paramedics to clinicians in hospital emergency departments. The Crisafulli government has pledged to reduce the statewide average of ramping to below 30 per cent by 2028.

United Workers Union Queensland state secretary Fiona Scalon called on the Queensland Ambulance Service to intervene and for the directive to be rescinded, setting out her concerns in a four-page letter to Commissioner Craig Emery. “Ambulance resources exist to provide emergency clinical care and respond to community demand,” she wrote. “They should not be utilised as a mechanism to absorb hospital capacity pressures or compensate for overcrowding within emergency departments.”

“It’s not good enough that Queensland Health bureaucrats are telling hospital staff to push ambulance officers outside hospitals and impede them from doing the job they are supposed to do,” Scalon said. “What this shows is an incompetent government completely failing to address the issue of bed block and hospital wait times.” She said hospital workers and ambulance officers wanted to do their jobs, not be “pitted against each other in some kind of Hunger Games fight for beds”.

The government has boasted of reaching a quarterly ramping rate of 35.5 per cent in the June quarter, its lowest since COVID. But data released in August showed the rate had climbed to 42 per cent. At a press conference this week, Health Minister Tim Nicholls described the strain on emergency services and hospitals as concerning. “We remain focused with a laser-like intensity on those ramping numbers,” he said. “We have that 30 per cent target not because that 30 per cent number is a miraculous number … but because of what it means for every person who can’t get into an ED.”

Metro South and Mr Nicholls were contacted for comment.