Emergency - In Emergency Care !

It is understandable that hospital emergency departments would suffer patient overload while the eastern seaboard of Australia is wreathed in smoke from bushfires in Queensland and  New South Wales.  Sydney has resembled Beijing as visibility stopped the ferries on the harbour for many hours and people resorted to face masks to ease breathing difficulties.

Quite apart from this present emergency, the number of people presenting at state hospital emergency departments has increased by 6.6% over the past year,  The statisticians figures reveal that in the period July to September 764,610 people walked through the doors and that was an increase of 47,059 on the previous year.

What is alarming is the number of critically ill patients going to emergency departments is rising faster than population growth.  That is putting timelines of care under pressure as more patients waited too long for treatment. New South Wales emergency departments recorded their worst timeline-of-care results in five years.

Three in ten patients were not seen in the recommended time frame and almost a third of all patients spent more than four hours in an emergency department.  The median time patients spend in emergency departments was three hours and one minute and one in ten patients  spent eight hours and six minutes.

Ambulance crews were also responding to an elevated call out rate and responded to 320,000 calls in the three months period under review and this represented an increase of 7.6% on the previous year,
Patients brought in by ambulance  waited longer than thirty minutes to be transferred from paramedics to emergency department staff.

It is obvious that demand for emergency treatment is moving far beyond the plan that hospitals were  designed and built for.  The fact that emergency treatment is without charge has a lot to do with presentation numbers. Some people present to have cuts and bruises attended that would be better served by a visit to a General Practitioner but go to the emergency department because that is a free service.

There have been remedial plans such as establishing a bulk billing GP clinic adjacent to emergency departments so that the triage nurse that greets incoming patients could direct the flow  consistent with the need, but these have not been forthcoming.

Time to go back to the drawing board because there is every indication that this overuse of emergency departments will continue to increase.  Without relief, emergency departments will eventually become unworkable  !