ED patients waiting more than 24 for a bed, national hospital snapshot survey reveals

EXCLUSIVE: A patient endured a four-day wait for a bed at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, a snapshot of Australian Emergency Departments has revealed.

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A PATIENT endured a four-day wait for a bed at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, a snapshot of Australian Emergency Departments has revealed.

And South Australian hospitals had the nation’s worst performance for an indivdual state for bed waiting times for ED patients in the survey of 117 hospitals.

The survey was taken by the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine at 10am on Monday – a traditional bottleneck because of a lack of discharges over the weekend.

At that time, the RAH’s ED was the second worst in the nation for long waiting times. There were 27 patients under treatment waiting for a bed, including two who had waited for more than 24 hours and a mental-health patient who had been waiting for four days.

This was second only to an unidentified interstate hospital the survey found had 13 Emergency Department patients who’d been treated but waited more than 24 hours for a bed.

An average of 10.9 people under treatment had waited for beds for more than four hours in the South Australian EDs that responded to the survey. The four-hour wait figure was the worst in the nation.

An average of 5.1 had waited for more than eight hours and an average of 0.8 had waited for more than 24 hours. The eight and 24-hour wait period figures were exceeded only by the combined totals of Tasmania, the ACT and the NT.

A patient endured a four-day wait for a bed at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, a snapshot of Australian Emergency Departments has revealed.

The survey does not say how many SA hospitals responded to the survey.

Study author Professor Drew Richardson, of the Australian National University Medical School, said EDs were still gridlocked and patient saf-ety was being put at risk.

“This strongly suggests that 24-hour stays in the ED are the result of the choices made by health systems,” Prof Richardson said. And College for Emergency Medicine president Professor Anthony Lawler also warned the gridlock compromised patient safety.

He said: “This situation is putting lives on the line and should be . . . unacceptable.”

However, college SA faculty president Dr Tom Soulsby said there was good news in the data and he noted the situation had improved significantly at the RAH over the past three years. He emphasised the gridlock was a “whole of hospital” challenge rather than purely an ED issue, and changes such as efficient discharges in wards were required to free up beds.

“We still have significant access blockage issues but there has been a lot of work done to try to resolve those issues,” he said. “We’re getting patients to wards quicker than ever but the trouble is we still run out of beds. The ED at the RAH is actually less crowded than any time in the past three years. We have had definite improvements but there are still fundamental access issues.”

Dr Soulsby noted shifting to the new RAH was not the solution as any existing problems would relocate to the new site. He said: “We need to fix the access problems we have here, not take them to a new home.”

Health Minister Jack Snelling said the Transforming Health changes would free up gridlocks in EDs.

“These numbers again strengthen the need for the ­urgent reform we are undertaking with Transforming Health,” he said.

“Mondays are always busy because of a backlog in patient discharges from the weekend, but under (the reforms) there will be more senior doctors working weekends and after-hours, which will prevent that bottleneck.

The new RAH will also tackle this problem because many patients . . . will be admitted directly into specialist wards, bypassing emergency.”