Waiting... waiting... waiting in the Emergency Department

OUR SAY: EMERGENCY departments exist as parallel universes.

Toowoomba Hospital. June 2017. Picture: Bev Lacey

OUR SAY: EMERGENCY departments exist as parallel universes.

Day and night do not exist and the triage nurse rules supreme. The departments are the great equalisers: CEOs and the homeless sit side-by-side on plastic chairs while a television flickers in a corner.

Everyone must wait.

Tom Gillespie's report in today's edition into the Toowoomba Hospital's handling of patients who presented at its emergency department includes a reasonably sanguine assessment by health service chief executive Peter Gillies and an acknowledgement that he's working on patient flow in the hospital.

And therein lies the rub: Once someone has been seen by a treating doctor or nurse after arriving in ED, then what?

Figures for the Toowoomba Hospital show one in four patients' stays in the emergency department last more than four hours.

Perhaps they were waiting for treatment in the ED. Or perhaps they were waiting to be admitted to a ward.

It seems to me that these figures reflect a much more complete picture of a patient's experience in the emergency department.

No one wants to languish in an emergency department for more than four hours.

Thankfully, 75 per cent of us don't have to.

Pity the other 25%. 

Originally published as Waiting... waiting... waiting in the Emergency Department