Bush balladeer and comedian Mark "Lazy Harry" Stephens said his wife, who had a heart scare in Beechworth last August, waited more than an hour for an ambulance to come to her aid.

The scare prompted Stephens and his wife Wendy to move house from Beechworth, where they had lived for 28 years, to Wangaratta to be closer to medical services.

Last Friday, The Border Mail reported that ambulance response times for Indigo Shire were the worst in Victoria with an average time of 25 minutes for each call-out, way short of the 15-minute target.

The couple said they had nothing but praise for paramedics and other "on-the-ground" staff who came to their aid, but said they worried other people would suffer and possibly die from the inadequate response times.

"The staff were wonderful, but we had to wait for an ambulance to come from Wodonga which took more than an hour," Wendy Stephens said. "This clearly shows there's a big problem with the system."

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Stephens said he was aware that Indigo Shire Mayor Bernard Gaffney had been fighting for years to address the slow call-out times by Ambulance Victoria for the shire but the problem hit home when he saw his wife in agony.

"'Lazy Harry' doesn't do too much these days, but I might write a protest song because it is something that needs to be fixed," he said.

Mrs Stephens said her traumatic experience last August was the reason for the couple to sell their Beechworth home and move to Wangaratta.

"The whole system is broken down and, sadly, I can speak from personal experience, a terrible experience," she said.

"We had been out to dinner with friends and when we got home I started getting terrible chest pains - it was so bad Mark called triple 0 but they weren't answering so he drove me flat chat to here," Mrs Stephens said, pointing to the Beechworth Health Service sign.

"The hospital staff were fantastic, they stabilised me until the ambulance, that had to come from Wodonga, finally arrived more than an hour later.

"That was the thing that prompted us to move to Wangaratta where we feel safer knowing we are at least close to help if we need it again."

Meanwhile, Cr Gaffney, who has previously complained about the shire "always being rock-bottom for call-out times" has joined forces with MP for Northern Victoria Tania Maxwell to tackle the slow response time.

On Wednesday, in an address to State Parliament, Ms Maxwell said the shire desperately needed additional ambulance resources.

"Indigo Shire gets the wooden spoon for the worst ambulance response times in Victoria almost every quarter, year after year," she told parliament.

"The action I seek is for the minister to urgently establish a community paramedic trial site and expand the use of paramedic practitioners ... to Indigo Shire communities.

"The government is ploughing hundreds of millions of dollars into recruitment, training and more emergency call-takers, but communities are yet to see any significant improvements in performance response and our paramedics remain under sustained pressure."

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