Former Victoria Police boss Ken Lay will step down from his public ambulance and mental health board positions as he continues to work on identifying a site for a second supervised injecting room.
The long-serving public sector leader will finish up as chairman of the Forensicare and Ambulance Victoria boards on August 25.
Outgoing Ambulance Victoria and Forensicare board chair Ken Lay in 2020.Credit:Penny Stephens
Lay spent 41 years in the state’s police force and was appointed its chief commissioner in 2011, before stepping down in early 2015 to support his wife, Chris, through illness.
He is a well-known advocate for family violence prevention and also briefly served as chairman of Bushfire Recovery Victoria, visiting devastated communities in 2020 following the Black Summer fires.
“On behalf of the government, I would like to thank Mr Lay for his dedicated service to the Victorian community and I wish him and his family all the best,” Premier Daniel Andrews said in a statement on Friday.
Lay will continue his work on a report to determine the best location for a medically supervised injecting room in Melbourne’s city centre.
“Shifting patterns of drug harms in the CBD have prompted an extension of Mr Lay’s work which is expected to be completed by early next year,” Andrews said.
The premier flagged earlier this week that a decision on a location for the safe injecting room was unlikely to be finalised before the November 26 state election.
Ambulance Employees Australia Victoria, which represents the state’s paramedics, commended Lay on his decades of public service.
However, the union said there was no hiding that 2015 to 2022 was arguably the “darkest period” in Ambulance Victoria’s treatment of staff.
“Members are certainly not expressing to us any sadness on the news of Mr Lay’s departure,” union secretary Brett Adie said.
“The cultural issues in [Ambulance Victoria] were no secret to anybody in the organisation and it took brave paramedics coming forward to the media before we saw any commitment to change by the [Ambulance Victoria] board or the executive.”
Lay is the second member of Ambulance Victoria’s senior leadership team to exit the organisation this year, and the union hoped he wouldn’t be the last, Adie said.
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