News

After years of raising the unsafe practice of dispatching crews to patients with known occupation violence behaviours without a fixed address, a Metro 2 Health and Safety Representative (HSR) issued a Provisional Improvement Notice (PIN) in August 2024 directing Ambulance Victoria (AV) to remedy the contravention of the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004.

The PIN addressed that there was no system of work in place to capture, store, and subsequently alert ambulance crews to previously aggressive patients when they call from a public place or a different address. The PIN was disputed by AV on basis that Triple Zero Victoria (TZV) had advised that a new call-taking system would be rolled out in 2027 that could address the safety risk.

The disputed PIN was rightfully affirmed by WorkSafe, demonstrating that short-term controls are always required for all identified health and safety risks, even when a long-term control is proposed or when the employer has limited control over the systems used.

AV is required to control the risks, which was achieved by implementing the Behaviours of Concern (BOC) form to improve the collection of relevant patient information, while AV collaborated on a longer-term solution for the PAT app to be upgraded. This would support the operational teams in accessing historical information for POI that exhibit BOC that may or may not have a fixed location.

As per the AV Safety Bulletin Changes to Occupational Violence Resources published on 18 March, 2025, the key changes for members to be aware of are:

1. The Behaviours of Concern (BOC) form has been superseded by the new Patients of Interest Notification form, now live on OneAV.
2. The form contains a workflow of the process POI Notification process, including review and approvals.
3. The form contains resource material on how to assign an appropriate Risk Rating, and BOC score.
4. The PAT App now has two (2) tabs, Patient Alerts, and Patients of Interest.
5. The Health & Safety team are the responsible team for the review and upload of POI Notifications to content Manager and the PAT App.

VAU strongly encourages members to:

• seek out further details and the FAQ that was included in the 18/3/25 AV Safety Bulletin,
• continue reporting all OV incidents and near misses by lodging an HSCS/HII, and
• provide all feedback and suggestions for the POI process to your Area Manager (AM), who will collect and forward the feedback for review. The new POI process should also be an agenda item for local Health and Safety meetings to ensure that the process is effective, and that information is updated in a timely way.