SYDNEY, April 28 (Xinhua) -- The Victorian Government has announced the introduction of a real-time monitoring system to track demand for emergency services during health emergencies.
The system will be introduced to ensure a coordinated response to emergencies such as the "freak" thunderstorm asthma event that killed nine Victorians in November.
In emergencies, departments will send information on the demand for treatment to a central computer.
If more people than expected are contacting emergency services, the computer will alert the Health Department and Emergency Management Victoria who can beef up their responses.
The system was one of the recommendations in the report into the thunderstorm asthma crisis which was released on Friday.
Hospitals and ambulances were overwhelmed when a sudden cool change and thunderstorm hit Melbourne in November, spreading microscopic pollen particles across the city and causing respiratory problems for thousands.
In addition to the nine people who died, more than 8,500 attended emergency department of hospitals.
Jill Hennessy, Victoria's Health Minister, said that the scale of the storm was unprecedented internationally.
"This was a demand on a scale than Black Saturday (Australia's worst ever bushfire); it was a scale and demand much bigger than the heatwave of January 2009, where we saw around 600 additional deaths," Hennessy told reporters on Friday.
"Emergency services had never seen anything like this before."
The Victorian Government will provide 10 million U.S. dollars in the state budget to fund a series of measures to monitor and predict thunderstorm asthma events.
