Plan For Speedy Patient Care Left Untested
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday October 11, 2007
PHYSICIANS are unhappy that a NSW Health Acute Care Taskforce recommendation made two years ago to help relieve emergency departments has not been implemented despite a positive response by doctors.
The proposal was for physicians to start treating patients while they were waiting for a ward bed - even if that meant attending to them in the corridors of emergency - to save time and relieve emergency doctors.Usually physicians wait until a patient is admitted to a ward.Yesterday a taskforce member, Christopher Clarke, a visiting thoracic physician at Concord Hospital, said he was disappointed the proposal, made in December 2005, was yet to be implemented."It was the flavour of the month for quite some time up until several months ago, but it seems to have dropped off the radar, and I don't know why," Dr Clarke said. The taskforce's monthly meeting was due on Friday. The Royal Australasian College of Physicians has urged the NSW Health Department to implement the proposal, saying it has accepted the recommendation and that it will address staff shortages in emergency."The physicians' involvement can be very important in facilitating the patient's management and shortening their overall stay in hospital," said the college's president of adult medicine, John Kolbe. According to a snapshot survey in June of emergency departments by the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, 40 per cent of the emergency workload was spent caring for patients waiting to be admitted to a ward."And these are patients who have been in the emergency department for more than eight hours," said the college's NSW chairman, Tony Joseph.Dr Joseph said studies showed that the longer a patient was in emergency the higher their overall rate of stay in hospital and the greater the risk of an adverse incident, such as a medication error.He welcomed the physicians' proposal. "We're very happy for the in-patient teams to get involved as early as possible in the care of in-patients," Dr Joseph said. "Hardly any of the recommendations that clinicians have made have been implemented because of resourcing issues and because they [NSW Health] haven't been listening to us as well," Dr Joseph said.Another taskforce, the Emergency Care Taskforce, which physicians resigned from in frustration a year ago, has demanded that it no longer have to report to the Health Department, he added. "We agreed to reconvene it on the condition that we report directly to the Minister [for Health Reba Meagher] and the Director-General [Debora Picone] because we felt that our concerns had not been met with the Health Department and it was a waste of time meeting them," Dr Joseph said."We have got a short time frame. We need to see action and, if we don't see action in the next couple of meetings then our taskforce won't continue."We're not going to come up against the brick walls of people in the Health Department telling us how to run an emergency department."
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald
