‘Patients are dying unnecessarily’: Doctors’ damning assessment of Launceston General Hospital

The emergency room of a northern Tasmania hospital is ‘unsafe’, with patients ‘dying unnecessarily’, doctors have warned.

The Launceston General Hospital emergency room is “unsafe”, with patients “dying unnecessarily” due to inadequate staffing and overcrowding, while people with respiratory illness cannot be isolated, fuelling fear of COVID-19.

This damning assessment of conditions at northern Tasmania’s main hospital is painted by ER doctors, whose explosive letter to health management was exposed in state parliament on Tuesday.

The state Liberal government immediately responded by ordering the chief health bureaucrat to consider an immediate response.

“Our patients have died unnecessarily, they have died because we did not have appropriate space to treat and monitor them,” says the letter, written on Monday and signed by 19 emergency doctors.

“The waiting room often has at least 20 patients, with only a triage nurse and another registered nurse… to care for them.

“A patient recently died in the waiting room under these circumstances. It is the general feeling amongst staff that if he had been in a monitored area his deterioration would have been noticed well before his death.”

Saying they could “no longer be silent”, the doctors warn the ER is “not safe for patients” and that medicos are “forced to give suboptimal care”. “We urge you to act immediately…” the letter says.

“We will continue to treat those who are unwell as best we are able. However, working with this increased workload in a department that is constantly bed-blocked is unacceptable, dangerous and unstainable.”

Patients were dying, separated from family, on ambulance stretchers, while family of dead or dying patients often had to be told the news in the company of others, who might include “an intoxicated patient who is yelling and aggressive”.

Immunocompromised patients were forced to sit with patients who may have “readily contagious respiratory disease”, prompting fears the LGH could spark a second wave of COVID-19.

“It would be a tragedy if the disease (coronavirus) took a foothold in our community again due to a lack of appropriate waiting spaces for patients with respiratory illness,” the doctors say.

The local state Labor MP for Bass, Michelle O’Byrne, said many of the changes the doctors call for in the letter had been raised at a medical summit mid-last year. “(Health Minister) Sarah Courtney needs to fix the chronic bed block and understaffing at the LGH before more patients die unnecessarily,” Ms O’Byrne said.

Ms Courtney said the government had made improvements at the LGH but was open to doing more. “I have asked the secretary of the (Health) department to consider the concerns raised … and local management will be engaging closely with these staff,” she said.