Northern Beaches Hospital to take pressure off Emergency department

A medical centre within Northern Beaches Hospital is set to increase its hours and staff to help take pressure off the Emergency department as one of the facility’s top doctors reveals ‘morale is really good’.

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A medical centre within Northern Beaches Hospital is set to increase its hours and staff to help take pressure off the Emergency department, where there were long waiting times when it opened on October 30.

The centre, which works alongside the Emergency department, will now open an hour earlier at 9am and close at 8pm.

A medical centre within the Northern Beaches Hospital is set to increase its hours and staff to take pressure off the Emergency department. Picture: Craig Willoughby

There are also plans to increase its opening days from six to seven, as well as increasing the number of GPs on duty during the day from two or three to four or five.

ED director Dr Andy Ratchford told the Manly Daily he hoped the extended opening times would reduce pressure on the Emergency Department.

Around 150 to 155 emergency patients are treated per day — just less than the 160 seen at Manly and Mona Vale hospitals combined.

Another 20 are being seen at the integrated medical centre if it is deemed their injury or illness can be dealt with by a GP, which is also helping to reduce waiting times.

Dr Andy Ratchford at Mona Vale Hospital Emergency department. Adam Yip / Manly Daily

On top of that Mona Vale Hospital’s Urgent Care Centre, which can treat people with minor injuries and illnesses, is playing an important role and is seeing around 50 patients a day, a number they didn’t expect to reach until next year.

Dr Ratchford said initial problems within Northern Beaches Hospital’s Emergency department have been resolved and patient waiting and discharge times are improving week by week.

For the past two weeks staff have offloaded 97 per cent of patients from ambulances within the required time.

“In general things are improving and the issues we’ve had with equipment and staffing have been addressed,” Dr Ratchford said.

“We have taken on some more medical staff and are recruiting more in February including emergency nurse practitioners, who are highly skilled and can manage patients independently.

“Morale is really good, it’s a great place to work and patients are getting better treatment than they would have previously at Manly or Mona Vale hospitals.”

The emergency department at the Northern Beaches Hospital. Picture: Julie Cross.

Dr Jonathan Adams, who runs the onsite medical centre, said for patients who were unsure whether they were an emergency case or not, Northern Beaches Hospital had a great system.

“If they see the triage nurse in ED and they believe a GP can deal with them, they send them through to us and vice versa, it works the other way too if we have a patient we think should be seen in emergency,” Dr Adams said.

He said that patients liked the medical centre because they got an appointment time.