Health and Emergency Services

Victorians deserve a health system that puts patients before bureaucracy. Despite record expenditure, too many people still wait beyond clinically recommended times, ambulances remain ramped outside hospitals, regional communities lose local services, and clinicians waste time on duplicated paperwork and disconnected systems instead of treating patients.

One Nation will focus the health system on timely treatment, local access, and measurable results. We will cut waste, put more nurses and doctors on the wards, use every available theatre, protect regional hospitals, and hold the system accountable for the care it actually delivers.

Our Policies

Lower Costs, More Care

Lower Costs and Deliver More Care

What we will do:

Fix electronic medical records so they work statewide. Labor let each health network choose its own EMR from 2017, leaving incompatible systems that do not share records when a patient moves between networks. CareSync Exchange is rolling out in Victoria, but it is still incomplete and largely view-only, and the underlying multi-vendor EMR problem remains. We will require linked, interoperable clinical records so clinicians can access the history they need for safe care, use shared technology, and cut duplicated paperwork once the records actually talk to each other.
Improve theatre utilisation and protect elective operating capacity so existing facilities perform more planned operations and fewer patients are cancelled on the day because emergency work has overrun. Major tertiary hospitals already run dedicated emergency theatres around the clock. We will not add spare emergency theatre capacity that sits idle. The focus is better use of what we have, protected elective lists, and cutting avoidable same-day cancellations.
Use Victoria’s statewide purchasing power to drive down implant and medical-device prices while preserving clinical choice.
Add transitional, rehabilitation and respite capacity to free up acute beds, reduce bed block, and cut unnecessary hospital stays so wards can take patients out of emergency and ambulances are not left ramped outside.
Redirect every dollar saved from administrative cuts and non-clinical programs into more nurses, more doctors on the wards, and more beds.

A Wait-List Guarantee

What we will do:

Create a real-time statewide view of surgical and specialist waiting lists.
Expand safe same-day surgery, enhanced recovery, hospital-in-the-home, and seven-day discharge services so more Victorians get treated and go home sooner.
Roll out nurse-led discharge and nurse prescribing as patient-flow reforms using existing experienced nursing staff. Victoria has been late to these models compared with the rest of the country; we will catch up with proper structure and governance, not more bureaucracy.
Publish clear triage performance: Category 1 patients must be seen immediately; Category 2 within ten minutes. Chronic ambulance ramping is not fixed by Cat 1 and Cat 2 targets alone. It is driven by whole-of-hospital flow, bed block, ward capacity and slow discharge, especially for Category 3 and Category 4 patients who need emergency care but are not immediately life-threatening. We will set public targets that attack ramping through beds, discharge speed, nurse practitioners and ward capacity, not slogans about the sickest patients who are already seen first.

A Regional Healthcare Guarantee

What we will do:

Guarantee minimum regional services, including 24/7 emergency departments and core maternity and surgical capacity in major regional hospitals.
Apply a strict Local Access Test before any major specialty can be removed, downgraded or relocated.
Hold health networks accountable for waiting times, patient outcomes, local access and efficient delivery — with consequences for persistent failure.
Grow the regional workforce, not just the service list on paper. Expand regional specialist trainee posts, working with the AMA and colleges, and bonded or contracted regional consultant pathways so doctors who train in the regions stay there. A 24/7 emergency department or maternity service means nothing without staff.

Cut Bureaucracy and Duplication

What we will do:

Protect ward clerks, bookings, medical records and other staff who directly support safe patient care.
Share IT, procurement, payroll and corporate services statewide instead of duplicating them across dozens of health services.
Abolish standalone DEI, ESG and other non-clinical corporate programs that cannot demonstrate a necessary patient-care, safety or legal purpose, and put the verified savings straight into frontline care.

Emergency Services

Firefighters do some of the most dangerous and essential work in Victoria. They run towards fires, accidents and emergencies that the rest of us run from. They put their lives on the line to protect people, homes and communities.

That work depends on reliable equipment. Fire trucks have a defined service life for a reason. After a certain age, parts become harder to source, technology falls behind, and the risk of breakdowns rises. Victoria has been running too many of these trucks well past that point and hoping they keep working.

When the trucks are old, the danger falls directly on the firefighters inside them and on the communities waiting for help. Breakdowns, reduced capability and outdated technology cost time, and in a fire, time costs lives. Giving firefighters a modern, reliable fleet is the bare minimum required to do the job safely.

What we will do:

Introduce a proper rolling fleet replacement program under contract.
Fire Rescue Victoria: maintain an average fleet age of seven years, retire trucks at fifteen, and place replacement orders at twelve years so there is never a gap.
CFA: maintain an average fleet age of ten years, earmark trucks for replacement at eighteen, and fully replace them by twenty.
Sell retired CFA appliances to farmers and rural landholders. A twenty-year-old truck is no longer suitable for a brigade, but it remains highly useful on a private property and can generate a return instead of being scrapped.
Require emergency services planning in every major new housing development before homes are built. This includes response times, station locations, road access and water supply. Developers will contribute to the infrastructure their estates will need.
Fit Starlink units in fire trucks to provide reliable communications and mapping in areas with no mobile coverage, exactly where many fires occur.
Fully audit the Fire Services Levy (now the Emergency Services and Volunteers Fund) and publish every line of it: what was collected, where the money went, and how much actually reached trucks and stations.
Replace the current levy with a new, transparent funding mechanism that actually supports frontline firefighting capability rather than burying money in bureaucracy.

Organ Donation

Recording a donor wish on a Victorian driving licence stopped in the early 2000s. Only 23% of eligible Victorians are now on the Australian Organ Donor Register. South Australia kept the licence pathway. There, 74% are registered, more than three times Victoria’s rate, and more than double the national figure of 35%.

Many Victorians still think the old licence tick is how you join. It is not, and some of those historic ticks were never transferred. The only record hospitals check is the national register.

The process should be one step. At the licence counter, or online with VicRoads or Service Victoria, you are asked if you want to be a donor. A yes is lodged on the Australian Organ Donor Register there and then — the same national record used in every state. No second form. No separate website. No waiting to be transferred. You can also say no, name which organs you will give, or take yourself off later.

Registration is not donation: the family is still asked. Families say yes about eight times in ten when the person is registered, and about four times in ten when they are not registered and nobody knows what they wanted.

What we will do:

Make it one step. Ask the question when a Victorian gets or renews a licence. A yes is written to the Australian Organ Donor Register in that same action, not a prompt to go somewhere else and start again.
Integrate it nationally. Victoria will use the existing national register, not build a state list. A decision made at VicRoads is the decision a hospital in any state can see.
Improve choice. You can register, decline, name which organs and tissue you will give, change your mind, or withdraw, in the same one-step process. Anyone 16 or over.

The system will be judged on results, how quickly people are treated and whether they can get care close to home, not on the size of its corporate structure. One Nation will deliver a health system that works for patients, not for bureaucrats.