It was terrifying. As the minutes ticked by little Cooper Harrison's parents felt more and more frantic.
The two-year-old had lost consciousness, his eyes rolling back and his head shaking as he suffered repeated seizures. They called his name, rousing him a little, as they rang an ambulance knowing the station was 10 minutes down the road from their home at Bobs Farm near Newcastle.
"I can't explain the fear that goes through you," his dad, Brad Harrison, said. "I'm not religious in any way but there were some prayers."
Ten minutes passed. Then 20. Then 30, all the while with Cooper still intermittently shutting his eyes and having seizures. Finally, 43 minutes after Mr Harrison first called triple zero, and 38 minutes after the operator he spoke to assigned an ambulance, the emergency services arrived.
"If Mike Baird was to get on the phone with an emergency I'm pretty sure he'd have Westpac landing at his front door," said Mr Harrison, who is furious not only about the event but the fact he feels it has been downplayed by health authorities.
"When we got to the hospital four of the ambulance bays were taken up with ambulances that couldn't get in [to offload their patients]. It was gridlock."
NSW Ambulance has been wracked by delays for the past few weeks, which paramedics say has been created by a perfect storm of not enough ambulances to meet demand and delays at hospitals across the state that are too full to admit patients, leaving ambulances waiting for hours in some cases at emergency. But NSW Ambulance denies this, saying it is simply prioritising the most urgent cases.
This week Fairfax Media revealed the tragic death of a man at Hurstville after an ambulance did not arrive in time is being investigated by the ambulance service, although in that case the service denies resourcing problems contributed.
Labor health spokesman Walt Secord said the government must commit to addressing the growing crisis.
"The prospect of waiting up to 43 minutes for an ambulance to respond when there is an emergency with your two-year-old child sends a shiver down every parent's spine," he said.
"The community would be rightly horrified to think the Baird government has stripped so many resources away from our paramedics that it now appears faster for people to make their own way to the hospital."
Health Services Union councillor and paramedic Greg Bruce told Fairfax Media shortages across the state meant ambulances were being sent far and wide from their local stations, and were regularly facing massive delays to respond to call-outs.
Helen Dunn and John Homersham faced an agonising wait on the road in Waterloo earlier this month, after an elderly friend fell after attending a trivia night at a local pub.
Told not to move him, they held him on the road where he lay on the 13 degree night until an ambulance arrived nearly 40 minutes later.
At one stage an ambulance arrived, only to speed up again and drive off when it received a more urgent call before it stopped.
"We had a man in his eighties lying on the cold ground, with cars coming past having to go on the other side of the road," Mr Homersham said.
Ms Dunn said if this was what happened on a normal night in Sydney, she was terrified to think what would happen if there was a major incident.
"If they can't even get an old man to hospital, I just don't think the system would cope with something like that," she said.
NSW Ambulance Senior Assistant Commissioner David Dutton said neither of the two cases were life-threatening emergencies, which would always receive priority.
"In both cases, the initial ambulance crews responded were reassigned en route to patients with higher acuity life-threatening conditions. In both cases, paramedics arrived with the patient within 38 minutes of being assigned an ambulance.
He said only 10 per cent of triple zero calls were for life-threatening emergencies, and urged non-emergency patients to be patient.
"NSW Ambulance paramedics attending non-medical emergencies could mean a patient with a life-threatening emergency may have to wait, potentially putting their life at risk," he said.
The NSW government has said it increased funding for the ambulance service by 26 per cent since 2010, while the growth in ambulance emergency call-outs in that time had only been half that. It also has measures in place to deal with a surge in cases over winter.
