Victorians continue to face long ambulance wait times as it takes more than 15 minutes for paramedics to respond to one in three critical dispatches.

New data released on Tuesday shows while there was a slight improvement in ambulance response times from January to March, the health system was still buckling under pressure.

Paramedics were called to 92,413 code one cases - the most time-critical emergencies - in the January-March quarter and responded to 65.2 per cent within 15 minutes.

Despite a marginal improvement on the previous quarter, this was still significantly lower than the 2014 response rate of 73 per cent.

The Victorian government has long blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for soaring health-care services demand in the state.

Premier Daniel Andrews said there was still room for improvement and it will be a long journey to repair and rebuild the health system.

"COVID is not over from a hospital point of view," he told reporters on Tuesday.

"The rest of us are getting about our lives and we have kind of normalised this, but we still have more than 300 patients that are in hospital.

"Some of them are very unwell and that still does put pressure and a burden on our staff."

On average, nearly 54 Ambulance Victoria staff were furloughed every day because of COVID between January and March.

But it marked a drop in COVID-related staff sick days across the ambulance service and the broader health network, helping to slightly improve response times, Ambulance Victoria said.

The state government has spent billions on the health system during the pandemic, including a $26 million package to add 40 mobile intensive care paramedics across the state.

It has also spent $1.5 billion on a COVID-19 catch-up plan, paving the way for 46,548 patients to undergo surgical procedures in the past quarter.

Nonetheless, almost 79,000 Victorians were still on the elective surgery waiting list by the end of March.

The total waitlist has marginally dwindled over each of the past five quarters but average overdue wait times have continued to rise for semi and non-urgent surgeries.

Mr Andrews said median treatment times "move around" from time to time while noting the government's commitment to grow the state's total surgeries from 200,000 to 240,000 each year.

"This is not a blitz," he said.

"This is not some one-off thing where we go and do a heap of extra surgery and then go back to a historical average ... and then have a churn affect and come back here in three years."

Opposition health spokeswoman Georgie Crozier used the figures to paint a different picture, saying they showed the health system remains in crisis.

"The government might spin all they like about these figures but they are still damning and very concerning," she said.