HEALTH EMERGENCY
EMERGENCY Department doctors at the Royal Hobart Hospital have warned management that patients will continue to die unless action is taken to fix a chronic bed block problem.
A five-page letter obtained by the Mercury reveals patients are waiting as long as 170 hours to be admitted to a ward.
“Extreme access block and ramping are having a devastating effect on our patients,” the letter says.
“There have been abundant cases of direct patient injury and death resulting from access block.”
EMERGENCY department doctors say bed block is injuring and killing patients – and say they can back up their view.
Doctors say they have offered Royal Hobart Hospital management “as many examples as desired” of the problem.
The RHH executive was this week sent a five-page letter outlining the registrars’ concerns and a list of recommended measures.
Patients in the emergency department were waiting as long as 170 hours to be admitted to a ward, there were too few southern ambulance crews and there was a need for more nightshift registrars, the doctors wrote.
The letter said without the measures emergency doctors staff anticipated “increased patient complaints, litigation and coronial investigations”.
“Extreme access block and ramping are having a devastating effect on our patients,” the letter said.
“We are unable to meet most national emergency department KPIs [including time to analgesia, inpatient review, ambulance off-loading, antibiotics], and there have been abundant cases of direct patient injury and death resulting from access block.
“System failures are also causing severe moral injury, physical exhaustion, emotional depletion and psychological trauma among our registrar group,” the doctors wrote.
“We anticipate substantial emergency registrar sick leave in the coming months due to illness, stress and exhaustion as a direct result of continued access block and the upcoming flu season.”
Among the doctors’ requests were better escalation plans, more staff and a “clear and concise written declaration [saying] we will not be held individually responsible for any adverse events occurring during times of access block”.
Independent federal MP for Clark Andrew Wilkie yesterday said the State Government urgently needed to spend more money on the health system.
He called on Health Minister Michael Ferguson to resign – if not, the Premier should sack him, Mr Wilkie said.
“It is 2019, we’re a capital city in one of the richest counties in the world,” he said.
“We have the wherewithal and we have the money: it’s the decisions of government, and only the decisions of government, that are causing the chronic underfunding of the public health system.”
A Tasmanian Health Service spokesman said hospital management had already written to staff acknowledging increased patient demand.
“Demand pressures do fluctuate depending on the number of patients presenting for care,” the spokesman said.
He added staff safety and wellbeing was a priority for the THS and following a recent patient death all staff were offered assistance and support.
The staff who wrote the letter had been invited to meet to work together on solutions.
The Coroner’s office this week confirmed it was investigating the death of a man in the hospital waiting area.
There have been abundant cases of direct patient injury and death RHH DOCTORS
A MASSIVE 48 per cent blowout in waiting times for elective surgery is seeing thousands of patients dying before they get surgery while others are waiting over two years for treatment.
Waiting times for elective surgery in public hospitals are now at the highest level since records began in 2001-02 with half of all patients waiting at least 40 days for treatment, up from 27 days sixteen years ago and up from 36 days in 2013-14.
Before they even make it onto the surgery waiting lists many patients have waited over 440 days just to get an appointment with a specialist — the first step towards getting on the waiting list.
This means from the time their GP recommends them for surgery it can be two years or more before they have the operation.
Waiting times vary enormously at hospitals around the country with queues as low as zero days for some procedures at some hospitals while at others, wait times are over a year. who need a knee replacement wait 260 days while at Royal Hobart Hospital the wait is just 172 days.
At Royal Hobart Hospital half the patients wait over 114 days for a tonsillectomy while at Launceston General Hospital the wait is 27 days.
At Mersey Community Hospital half the patients wait over 173 days for cataract surgery while at Launceston General Hospital the wait is just 93 days.
A report card by the AMA supplied exclusively to News Corp shows one million people requiring urgent surgery in public hospitals were waiting longer than clinically recommended.
A News Corp investigation has found thousands of people are dying before they get the surgery they need, with more than 8200 people removed from the waiting lists because they died or were not contactable. Today the Mercury helps readers navigate the system and find the public hospitals with the shortest waiting times using information from the government’s My Hospitals website.