How exactly do you expect an ambulance to be able to reach any part of a county in under 12 minutes??

Yes, I believe your understanding is lacking. Ambulances are dispatched for other medical emergencies as well. Compared to many other parts of Australia and even the world, the response time statistics claimed are very good.

Sadly, A heart attack can be fatal even with immediate medical intervention at a hospital. A defibrillator can only correct certain kinds of abnormal heart electrical activity.

In my experience as soon as the dispatcher understands it's a medical problem, has confirmed the address and that the patient is not breathing, they will begin talking the caller through performing CPR.

I suppose if I was concerned about it, the burden would be on me to move somewhere closer to the hospital or wherever the ambulance stages between calls. Unfortunqtely, there's always a chance no ambulance is available or that an accident has blocked the road.

How soon do you believe assistance should arrive?

Cardiac events don’t usually work like that. You could, for example, get permanent damage if your heart attack isn’t treated within 30 minutes (as a guideline, the circumstances vary heavily). Even an aneurism doesn’t often act quicker than 20 minutes. But ya, sub 10 minute response times only happen in a hospital, sub 1 minute response times in intensive care, etc…

Still, you feel like you are having a heart attack, call 911 (in the US) right away. The main time killer is probably just you recognizing that you need help (vs the time it takes to get help once called).

This isn’t an inherent flaw of public health care. A lot of the health care problems in this country (Australia) stem from a continued disinvestment in the public system after a decade (prior to the current government) of conservative mismanagement. Most state funding here comes from the federal governments standard sales tax. They intentionally gimped our public system to fund a private system that isn’t financially viable. Reversing that is going to take time. The problem exists it’s just important to attribute it to the correct sources. Medicare (our public insurer) is an incredible privilege that we should protect and hold our leaders accountable for managing.

Wow. I didn’t know that things are this way. I am a recent immigrant living close to the city and always seem to be able to see a GP on the same day. Is that because I have private insurance and I pay out of pocket anyways? If I were a citizen, I wouldn’t be able to go to those places (at least for “free healthcare”), and will have the same wait times? Or is it geography dependent with rural Victoria having issues and Melbourne city being well covered?

I pay ~500 US/mo for health insurance. Just for me, no dependents. Not an exotic low-deductible health insurance plan. 2% on top of income tax sounds like a dream.

What about helicopters? Does Melbourne not have/use theirs in those cases or is the system just overwhelmed?

Asking because (different country) when we had a person present with stroke symptoms and called 911, they sent both an ambulance and the helicopter. The heli came first but it had to land a ways off on a field and they had to walk over and basically arrived around the same time as the ambulance. A couple minutes earlier basically. No fire engine dispatched but that made sense too as it's volunteer based and while they would've been much closer, getting them to the station would've taken longer than the helicopter.

Driving time for the ambulance if it came from the same place as the helipad would've been about 15 min for the ambulance. Fire engine driving time from volunteer department: 2 min but no dedicated paramedic services, just volunteer firefighters. Heli time in air probably about 2 minutes given the "as the crow flies" distance I just checked, add whatever time is needed to get them in the air and such.

Now I can't really trust these numbers fully of course but according to "a quick AI analysis" :P Melbourne with millions of population has 0.08 helicopters and 8-10 ambulances per 100k population while the aforementioned location is at about 0.3 helicopters per 100k and 6-12 ambulances. Can it be true? It also says New York City has no emergency helicopters at all? Los Angeles has 0.18 per 100k? I know my current location definitely also has none at all. For millions of people.

Yes it's Hatzolah. It's a volunteer Jewish organization - run (and paid for) by the local Jewish community, but we respond to anyone who calls us, regardless of background or ethnicity.

(There are Hatzolah organizations all over the world, where there are Jewish communities.)