Question - ACT Ambulance Service

1. Did the annual report from 2020-21, state that the Government would undertake the purchase of 51 standard vehicles and nine low-emissions vehicles as part of the Emergency Service Agency’s Vehicle Replacement Program; if so,  how many of these are ambulances.
2. How many ambulances are there in the service.
3. How many of these are Police, Ambulance and Clinician Early Response vehicles?
4. How many ambulances were there prior to this promise in (a) 2018, (b) 2019, (c) 2020, (d) 2021 and (e) 2022.
5. How many were decommissioned for each year referred to in part (4).

(1) The Government committed to the purchase of 51 frontline and critical vehicles, of which nine are low emissions vehicles. This commitment is for vehicles across the ACT Emergency Services Agency (ESA) fleet. 24 of these are ambulances, of which one is a low emission vehicle. The commitment is over a five-year period from the 2020-21 financial year to the 2024-25 financial year and is for the replacement of existing fleet vehicles.

(2) As At 30 June 2022, there were 32 emergency ambulance vehicles in service, five non‑emergency patient transport vehicles, one retrieval ambulance, one 4x4 wheel drive ambulance, and one bariatric ambulance. All these vehicles are stretchered vehicles and fit within the conventional category of an ‘ambulance’. The ACT Ambulance Service (ACTAS) also has access to other vehicles, including PACER frontline response vehicles and other support vehicles.

(3) There are three PACER vehicles of which two are frontline response vehicles and one is a support vehicle. The PACER vehicles do not fall into the category of an ‘ambulance’.

(4-5) The tables below provide details on the number of ambulance vehicles that were in service, the number of new additions to the existing fleet, the number of replacement vehicles for the existing fleet, the number of ambulance vehicles that were decommissioned for each of the years referred to in the question. The tables do not include other vehicles that ACTAS has access to, including PACER frontline response vehicles and other support vehicles.

It should be noted that when a new replacement vehicle arrives, it is kitted out to be made operational before it is swapped with the old vehicle currently in service. This means that if the ESA had 10 new vehicles arrive at the same time, the fleet would temporarily increase by 10 vehicles, until the old vehicles are decommissioned and moved on.

There are also instances where the replaced vehicles are repurposed. For example, a replaced emergency ambulance vehicle can be rotated through non-emergency patient transport, and therefore, take further time to rotate out of the fleet.

In addition, when a vehicle is in the process of being rotated out of the active fleet there is a period of time where it is not counted as an operational vehicle but has not yet been decommissioned.  Therefore, a direct comparison of total operational vehicles across years is not possible as the table below does not include these non-operational but not yet decommissioned vehicles.