Less than half of seriously ill patients attending NSW emergency departments are receiving treatment on time as the state’s health minister blamed unprecedented demand for hospitals and ambulances on declining access to bulk-billed GP visits.
More patients visited NSW hospitals with immediately life-threatening conditions such as stroke, heavy bleeding and severe chest pain than any three-month period since 2010, hospital data for July to September showed.
At Prince of Wales in Randwick, less than a quarter of patients with life-threatening conditions started their treatment within 10 minutes.Credit: Aresna Villanueva
These “triage two” patients require treatment within 10 minutes, but fewer than half met that benchmark, another record low that has alarmed doctors and nurses struggling to keep up with increasing numbers of patients with complex and serious conditions.
“Patients are getting sicker,” said Jess Kybert, a NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association delegate working in the emergency department at Blacktown hospital.
“They [patients] … are having to wait longer because we don’t have the resources, the staff and the spaces to get to them within the appropriate time-frames.”
Only 22 per cent of triage two patients at Blacktown hospital start treatment within 10 minutes – twice as many as the same time last year – but second to Campbelltown hospital (11.8 per cent) as the worst-performing major hospital emergency department in the state.
Prince of Wales in Randwick had the poorest record of the state’s 14 principal referral hospitals, with fewer than a quarter of emergency patients receiving treatment within 10 minutes.
Despite a downward trend in the number of patients with semi-urgent and non-urgent conditions, a quarter of patients leaving NSW emergency departments in the past year believed their condition could have been treated by a GP or another health professional outside a hospital.
Health Minister Ryan Park said the results showed patients were being forced into emergency departments because they could not afford, or had to wait too long, to see a GP.
“The Commonwealth’s GP shortage crisis is placing severe pressure on our hospitals as people have little choice but to present to our EDs for non-emergency conditions,” Park said.
The comments have frustrated emergency doctors and nurses, who say the state government cannot avoid investing in hospitals by blaming the Commonwealth.
Dr Rhys Ross-Browne, a Sydney emergency doctor and NSW chair for the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said most patients visiting emergency departments could not be treated in a GP clinic.
“It’s important we don’t get distracted from that group who are the sickest, most complex group of patients coming through our doors,” he said.
Kybert said the government’s long-promised ratios in emergency departments would help nursing staff see patients more quickly.
Opposition health spokesperson Kellie Sloane said Park was attempting to throw Prime Minister Anthony Albanese “under the bus” to distract from his own government’s failings.
“Every one of these statistics is an unwell person who couldn’t access healthcare when they needed it,” Sloane said. “This is a problem of Labor’s making and it’s a problem that they need to fix.”
Health Minister Mark Butler said urgent care clinics funded by the federal government were taking pressure off NSW emergency departments, and more doctors had joined the health system in the past two years “than at any time in the past decade”.
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