Albury Wodonga Health: Hospital declares code yellow amid ‘significant’ wait times

A Victorian-NSW border hospital has declared an internal emergency as resources are stretched beyond their limits.

A Victorian-NSW border hospital has declared an internal emergency as it experiences “significant and prolonged” wait times with patients who delayed surgeries because of code brown, presenting with worsening conditions.

Albury Wodonga Health declared a ‘code yellow’ this week with some ambulances unable to respond to calls.

AWH chief operations officer Emma Poland said more than 200 patients were presenting per day.

“On Tuesday there were extended delays for ambulances and some of NSW Ambulance couldn’t respond to calls in the community,” Ms Poland said.

“We have seen a significant increase in category two patients, those are patients requiring to be seen within 10 minutes.

“There’s also been quite a spike in the number of patients requiring emergency surgery.”

Ms Poland said she believed the issue was being felt statewide and could be caused by Victoria’s code brown called earlier this year.

“We’re not alone in this,” Ms Poland said.

“If we look around the state and local hospitals, from what I understand they’re facing similar pressures and a similar demand as we are experiencing here.”

Code brown meant hospitals were able to redeploy staff to work in areas of highest clinical priority, such as the Covid department, which Ms Poland said could be the reason why more people were presenting in need of surgery.

A spokeswoman from AWH said: “It’s believed that people may have delayed getting treatment and are now presenting in a worse condition as they did not seek early and immediate treatment.

“As (code brown) was a statewide effort, it could account for all Victorian hospitals feeling the same pressure.”

While a new emergency department will be opened in Albury in 2023, Ms Poland said the hospital needed more resourcing beyond the ED.

“Our new emergency department is due to open its doors in mid-2023 that will have additional care points,” she said.

“But, I think really importantly we actually need the inpatient beds and capacity to support those care points.

“It’s not so much necessarily about the emergency capacity, it’s also about our hospital capacity to support the admissions coming from those patients presenting to our emergency departments.”

The code yellow is expected to be in place until late Friday or Saturday.