Cairns Hospital under Tier 3 status for a week, patients face long waits in ED

Cairns Hospital staff, who have been operating within the system’s highest alert level for a week, are under immense strain, affecting patient surgeries and ambulance wait times. Here’s what we know.

Cairns Hospital is operating under its highest alert level with near record levels of emergency department presentations in the past week.

Under tier three, semi-urgent and non-urgent surgeries are affected – possibly moved to the private hospital, rescheduled or suspended.

Patient loads could also be shared across the hospital network, and capacity could be expanded to include private hospital beds.

Dr Don Mackie, the hospital’s executive director of medical services, said the hospital was at 100 per cent capacity.

“We’ve been under tier three for about a week now,” Dr Mackie said.

“The demand on the hospital over the past 10 days has been particularly significant with very high inpatient volume.

“We’re seeing high volumes in the rural hospitals as well.

Cairns Hospital staff are under immense strain as the hospital remains under tier three conditions. Picture: Peter Carruthers

“We’ve had some staff sickness … that’s managed shift by shift … hats off to the staff who have pulled extra shifts to keep things going.

“Our record (for the ED) was in May 2022 when we saw 314 people presenting … we’re heading toward 300 recently.

“We’ve had some (ambulance) ramping … we started this morning with two or three patients being cared for on the ramp by QAS.”

Dr Mackie said the escalation to tier three had impacted surgical operations but could not say how many patients had been affected.

“We’re going to continue to do emergency surgery and urgent-elective surgery, but we may have to throttle back on the non-urgent elective surgery,” he said.

Dr Mackie said influenza presentations had been high and encouraged Far North residents to get their flu vaccination.

Emergency nurse Jacob Croker and Cairns Hospital's executive director of medical services Dr Don Mackie. Picture: Isaac McCarthy

“If people are unsure whether or not to come into the emergency department … there are a range of options: phone consultation with general practice, online support and 13HEALTH which is the free 24/7 phone service,” he said.

Emergency nurse Jacob Croker said there had been a greater amount of presentations of all illness and injury types during the past week.

“The number of acute presentations has put extra strain on us in the emergency department … we’ve had a lot of acutely unwell patients in the past week. We are feeling the strain as staff,” Mr Croker said.

“It’s difficult for patients as well who have to wait … but our message to people is ‘your health matters to us, we are going to see everybody and please just be patient with the staff’.

“When the hospital is full, when we’re in tier three, it’s a bit harder for us to flow through those patients in the ED because we need spaces to see people … if there’re not spaces in the hospital it takes us longer to find a space where we can actually see you.”

Originally published as Cairns Hospital under Tier 3 status for a week, patients face long waits in ED