WEST Australia's private ambulance company is fatally flawed, leaving patients to die waiting for assistance, whistleblower paramedics say.
ABC Television's Four Corners program tonight will reveal four deaths which staff say could have been avoided, if not for communication problems at the call centre.
In once case, an elderly woman died while waiting two hours for ambulance assistance.
Despite the caller insisting her grandmother was seriously sick, the call operator classified the job a "priority four" and "non-urgent".
With their identities protected, about 30 paramedics have spoken out, saying repeated requests for a new system to prioritise emergency calls have fallen on deaf ears.
They also say investigations into patient deaths which were not deemed a priority by the call centre should be made public.
The whistleblowers have collected internal audits which revealed 65 priority one cases were not initially dispatched as emergencies by the call centre in March this year.
"Being a paramedic we see lots of unfortunate things that are sad, it's part of what we do," one paramedic says during the program.
"And we live with that.
"But when we see people dying, young or old, when it's a system failure and it was very avoidable and the system has been told and refuses to fix itself, it's something you can't live with and that's why we're here."
Looks like the cats amongst the pigeons again!
