Released 05/12/2018
Canberra Health Services (CHS) chief executive officer Bernadette McDonald has reiterated her commitment to improving emergency department and elective surgery waiting times at Canberra Hospital.
Speaking about today’s release of ED and elective surgery data by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), Ms McDonald said waiting times were a challenge for all jurisdictions.
“One of my first priorities since joining CHS in October has been developing a Timely Care Strategy,” Ms McDonald said.
“The Timely Care Working Group has already commenced meeting to progress this work.
“We are very motivated to continually improve the services that we deliver and that is a commitment right across the organisation.
“There is a lot of good work that has already been done on timely care, we need to build on that and continue to identify the systems and processes that we can improve.
“The early indications are that we are moving in the right direction and we will continue to improve our systems and processes to ensure we continue to deliver quality, safe and timely care to our community.”
Emergency Department performance
A number of factors contributed to Canberra Hospital’s ED performance in 2017-18, including an increase in both the number of presentations to the ED and in the complexity of patient presentations.
“When compared to 2016-17, there were higher numbers of categories one, two and three presentations in 2017-18 and lower numbers of categories four and five presentations,” Ms McDonald said.
“The number of high acuity patients presenting to the ED can impact on the ED’s ability to provide more timely treatment to lower acuity patients.
“Canberra Health Services takes a whole of hospital approach to access and patient flow. We are reviewing our processes in relation to the discharge stream in the ED, admission to ward in the hospital, and patient discharge from the inpatient hospital setting. This should result in further improvements in ED timeliness.”
Funding announced in the 2018-19 budget will provide a number of additional full time equivalent frontline staff, including nurses, allied health workers and doctors.
Elective surgery
In ACT public hospitals, there were 13,340 removals from the waiting list for elective surgery in 2017-18, compared with 12,826 in 2016-17. That is a 4% increase, compared to an 0.1% increase nationally.
The Government has committed $64.7 million over the next four years to improve access to surgical care and reduce wait times, which will produce better health outcomes for patients in the ACT and surrounding NSW region.
Ms McDonald said a focus on reducing the number of elective surgery patients waiting longer than clinically recommended had impacted on the 2017-18 statistics.
“Long wait patients are only counted in this AIHW report once they have been operated on, so when you increase the number of long wait patients in comparison to within time patients the percentages drop,” she said.
“Our focus on long wait patients is having a flow on effect to our performance statistics in the short term. This will smooth out in coming years as we have less long waits.
“Canberra Hospital also continues to experience growing demand for emergency surgeries and this does place pressure on our operating theatres and bed capacity.”
Statement ends
- Statement ends -
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