A project had been launched to help patients face long delays but reports state that this attempt has failed and the reason for this is that other jobs could not be handled by paramedics as every week they had to spend many hours waiting outside emergency departments to hand over patients.

Consultants to tackle the problem at Monash Medical Centre and the Royal Melbourne and Austin hospitals were pooled in by the health department and due to ambulance ramping, largest number of patients are delayed here.

The wait has been more than 40 minutes for patients arriving by ambulance at Monash in March but a little impact was seen with last year's efforts.

Ways to handle the present problems were given by consultants and for this for patients more trolleys should be made available, keeping cubicles clean and making communication better between paramedics and the staff was important.

It was however admitted that not much will be gained out of this as the number of patients have been increasing and there are delays in getting patients an access to beds available at hospitals.

The state secretary of the ambulance union, Steve McGhie, said, "It means they are standing in line with a patient on their stretcher that they can't offload while there are other emergency cases out there waiting for them to respond to."