Health system caught in Omicron meltdown
OMICRON has caused a health system meltdown that is now threatening the health of people who don’t even have Covid.
Hundreds of thousands of sick Australians can’t get vital medical test results, medicines, surgery or other health care as the virus overwhelms not just the hospital system and ambulance services but GP clinics.
Pathology labs have been so swamped by demand for PCR tests there are long delays processing tests for people who have other health conditions. Some people are waiting nearly two weeks for results that would normally take days.
“If you want PCR testing for anything else, for instance to check what might be the cause of diarrhoea it hasn’t been happening,” Royal Australian College of General Practitioners NSW chair Dr Charlotte Hespe said.
Queensland GPs told News Corp there were major delays in tests for Ross River virus.
In Melbourne, one doctor told of waiting more than two weeks for a coeliac test result.
Leading pathology companies Sonic Healthcare and
Dorevitch Pathology said there had been no impact on reporting results for nonCovid testing.
Pharmacy Guild president Dr Trent Twomey confirmed there were major shortages of medicines for common conditions like blood pressure, high cholesterol and hormone replacement therapy for menopause.
Dr Hespe said one of her patients had a scan that showed an abscess in her bowel had ruptured and caused a hole in her vagina and her bladder but the report was never sent to her because the public hospitals were so overwhelmed. The patient ended up having emergency surgery.
Patients who had skin lesions removed have waited weeks for results to determine whether it was cancer.
A nursing home patient in a Brisbane practice nearly died after waiting four hours for an ambulance to arrive, after he had a heart attack.
Others waited more than five days for urgent heart bypass surgery because ICU beds were full of Covid patients.
News Corp is aware of a patient in a Sydney Hospital, who cannot independently use the toilet, who was left lying soiled in her bed for hours on Christmas Day. Doctors are predicting a serious blowout in elective surgery waiting lists due to the latest Covid-related surgery ban in public hospitals in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.
Before the Omicron outbreak there were more than 250,000 patients nationally waiting for elective surgery – some for as many as 595 days.
Meanwhile, Private Hospital Association chief Michael Roff estimates more than 300,000 surgeries that would have taken place in private hospitals in the past year had not gone ahead.