Forbidding ambulance costs deter heart attack victims from calling ‘000’: National Heart Foundation

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDMay 5 2010

According to a new survey conducted by The National Heart Foundation, the forbidding ambulance costs are preventing timely calls to the emergency by at least one in 10 heart attack victims. The Foundation also released a discussion paper released during Heart Week urging free universal ambulance services in all states and territories. Dr Bill Coote in the paper entitled Universal Ambulance Cover has also said that this would prevent many heart attack deaths.

The study was conducted in 2008 and surveyed 3176 Australians aged between 35-65 years of age. At least one in 10 responded that they would delay calling ‘000’ believing that the trip would be too expensive. On the grim side there are 46,000 deaths due to heart attacks each year in Australia with at least 50% never making it to the hospital. Dr. Coote says that at least 25% patients of heart attack die within the first hour of onset of symptoms. He says that, “Delay can be fatal.” “Best practice care for many medical emergencies requires early assessment, stabilisation, and rapid transport to an appropriate hospital facility….It is critically important that people with symptoms suggestive of heart attack seek urgent care,” he added.

He emphasized that emergency ambulance service “should become a universal health entitlement.” He suggested two funding options in the paper. The first was a nation-wide adoption of Queensland's Community Ambulance Cover levy collected by electricity retailers. The second alternative could be to increase the Medicare levy to cover the cost, or a direct funding from the federal government, he said.

Heart Foundation chief executive Lyn Roberts feels cost should not be a concern when it comes to an emergency like a heart attack. “Fifty per cent of people who die from a heart attack actually never make it to the hospital…I think often people feel that the ambulance is just a form of transport about getting to the hospital, but of course if you've got the symptoms of a heart attack and then you go into cardiac arrest, if you're in an ambulance they can do something about that right away…If you're in the back seat of someone's car, you can't,” she said. She urged the removal of such obstacles from appropriate health care. “We have very different costing arrangements: some rely on health insurance; some the ambulance services try and recoup the costs for people; there's a couple of states where they have decided to provide ambulance coverage for free… So it does seem time for us to really be able to have universal coverage across the country,” she added.