Adelaide’s hospital emergency departments are failing to meet a national target to ensure patients leave within four hours, new figures from SA Health show.
Figures showed about half of all patients who present to an emergency department in Adelaide have a stay of four hours or less, short of a national target of 90 per cent.
The figures also showed Adelaide’s northern hospitals have worsened over the past three years.
Modbury Hospital was treating 70 per cent of patients within four hours, but figures show that has dropped down to just 50 per cent.
By contrast, in most country hospitals almost all patients leave within four hours.
Australian Medical Association South Australian president Dr Patricia Montanaro said the reason for long waits was obvious.
“The hospital emergency departments are absolutely overcrowded, but all hospitals are also over capacity, especially in acute mental health beds and the areas where we need to get people out of hospital quicker,” she said.
“The second thing is that is means bed lock is alive and well. Bed block is when we can’t get people out the back end of the hospital and so we can’t get people into the hospital from the emergency department.
“This is a sign that there is crisis in the system.”
Dr Montanaro said getting people out of hospital earlier, or stepping them down into cheaper facilities would help alleviate the problem of overcrowding.
New health plan ‘crisis waiting to happen’
State Opposition health spokesman Stephen Wade said the figures showed Adelaide’s emergency departments were struggling to cope, and believed the situation would only worsen under the State Government’s Transforming Health plan.
“It’s a crisis waiting to happen for the Government to downgrade our three support hospital emergency departments,” Mr Wade said.
“Over the last four or five years, when the rest of the nation has generally been making significant progress in reducing emergency department waiting times, the South Australian Government has actually gone backwards in some hospitals and overall just stagnated.
“And in this environment they want to downgrade half of the emergency departments.”
Under the State Government’s Transforming Health plan the new Royal Adelaide Hospital will become the major multi-trauma hospitals, and the Flinders and Lyell McEwin hospitals will be considered a “super site” for major emergencies and the priority locations for responding ambulances.
Mr Wade said the Government should not be trialling “untested methods” when the health system is already at crisis point.
“I think we need to stop the emergency department changes because they will make things worse,” he said.
“Seventy per cent of people present to a hospital emergency departments without going through an ambulance and this Government is introducing a multi-tiered network of emergency departments, completely untested anywhere in the world and expecting people to be able to find their way to the right place.”
Transforming Health will alleviate pressure: SA Health
But SA Health chief executive officer David Swan said Transforming Health would help reduce overcrowding at Adelaide’s major hospitals by increasing bed capacity and rostering staff on a 24-hour-a-day basis.
“What Transforming Health found, which our clinicians support, is that we do have people in our hospitals that have had their treatment and no longer need to be there, staying in there for days and sometimes weeks because of other elements that they require, whether it was residential accommodation or some form of support, staying in a hospital occupying beds,” Mr Swan said..
“It also found that we don’t have sufficient senior staff staying on weekends to allow discharge of patients and for their ongoing care to be provided.
“And importantly Transforming Health will actually assist by moving to more of a seven-day-a-week service and Transforming Health also has a commitment to building additional capacity within the community and our hospitals for aged people that no longer are waiting placement to be moving out of acute beds.”
Mr Swan said SA Health is working towards implementing elements of the Transforming Health plan now.