Victoria’s ambulance response times remained stubbornly long over the first three months of this year despite the billions of dollars the state government is pouring into the health system.

The latest data, to be released on Tuesday, will show it took more than 15 minutes for paramedics to treat one in three high-priority, code-one incidents between January and March.

Ambulance Victoria was called to 92,413 code-one cases in the last quarter. Of those, 65.2 per cent were responded to within 15 minutes.

The state government says this represents a 5 per cent improvement on the previous quarter. But paramedics responded to fewer cases compared with October to December 2022, when there were a record 100,234 code-one cases.

Code-one patients are considered time critical and are second only to code-zero patients, who face life-threatening incidents.

Median emergency department waiting times are back to pre-pandemic levels, according to the government, at 18 minutes. That’s down from 20 minutes in the previous quarter.

Many Victorians waiting for semi-urgent surgery are still stuck on waiting lists for well over a month. But the government has cited an improvement in median waiting times to 19 days as opposed to the same period last year, when the median was 100 days. The improvement is to 21 days for non-urgent patients, who waited for a median 164 days in the March 2022 quarter.

More than 99 per cent of patients needing urgent surgery are treated within the recommended time frame of 30 days, according to the latest figures.