Ambulance Code 1 Response Time — Methodology and Sources

What this measures

Statewide 90th-percentile response time (minutes) for Code 1 ambulance incidents in Victoria — i.e. the time within which 90% of urgent, time-critical Code 1 calls are responded to.

Lower is better. Ambulance Victoria's official target is 15 minutes for 90% of Code 1 cases statewide.

How values are derived

The Productivity Commission's annual Report on Government Services (ROGS) publishes Code 1 response times by state in Table 11A.5, sourced from the Council of Ambulance Authorities (CAA). The series here stitches two ROGS releases:

Overlapping years (2020-21 and 2021-22) match exactly across the two releases, providing a cross-check.

Reading the line

• 2014–2019: gradual improvement from 22 to 18 minutes — the target (15) remained out of reach but the trend was healthy.
• 2020 onward: response times jumped sharply during the COVID period and have stayed roughly 27 minutes since. That's nearly double the published target.
• AV's quarterly performance reports show the percent within 15 minutes metric — the same underlying performance from a different angle (the figure has fallen from ~80% pre-COVID to ~65% post-COVID).

Caveats

• 90th percentile is a single point — a few extreme outliers do not move it much, but a broad shift in dispatch performance does. It's the right measure for "what does a Code 1 caller actually wait?".
• ROGS includes a separate Capital city slice with slightly different values; the line shown is the Statewide series.
• "Code 1" definitions are nationally consistent across ROGS jurisdictions, so cross-state comparisons in the underlying table are apples-to-apples.

Sources

• Productivity Commission — Report on Government Services 2026, Section 11 Ambulance services
• ROGS 2026 ambulance dataset CSV
• Ambulance Victoria — Our Performance (publishes the same underlying data with a different summary statistic)