FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES: Councillor Glenn Taylor.
ORANGE City Council is preparing its response to recommendations into changes in helicopter retrieval from the Orange base.
When member for Orange Andrew Gee released the long-awaited review in January he indicated he would also be responding to the recommendations after preparing two comprehensive submissions to the independent reviewer Ernst and Young.
The review was initiated by NSW Health Minister Jillian Skinner as part of an overhaul of the way the Ambulance Service of NSW delivers services to people in the state.
The review recommended Orange should have a 24-hour on-call service introduced next year and move to a system of staff on the base 24 hours a day, seven days a week by 2018.
One of the recommendations of the review into the way the Ambulance Service of NSW conducts its retrievals is that Orange and the central west needs to be serviced by a larger helicopter than the existing EC 145 helicopter, which is only funded to fly in daylight hours.
Orange City Council spokesman Nick Redmond said council, as one of the stakeholders who had been part of the submission process, had the opportunity to respond to more than 54 recommendations in the report.
“Obviously all those recommendations are not relevant to this area but we will be responding to around half of them,” Mr Redmond said.
Cr Glenn Taylor, who instigated a petition in 2011 to convince the Ambulance Service of NSW to give Orange a 24-hour service, said he was confident the facts would speak for themselves.
“We’ve got the backing of the clinicians here who say we need it and what we have to remember is that when the petition was lodged with Parliament it contained the second highest number of signatures ever on any petition,” he said.
“I hope now this is the light at the end of the tunnel and we get what we deserve here in Orange and the central west and that is the same level of service as people in the metropolitan area.”
Stakeholders involved in putting submissions to Ernst and Young have been told to lodge their responses to the review by the end of this month.
