The human face of Sydney’s ED crisis

That emergency departments are overcrowded and beset by long wait times would not shock NSW residents.

But Rachel Rasker’s story in today’s Herald puts a human face to the crisis, including one man who waited for more than three days at Bankstown Hospital and left before finishing his treatment.

Patients such as 70-year-old Victor Ishak, who presented to the emergency department with a severely swollen leg only to give up and go home, should expect to be seen in a more timely manner.

Ishak described his time at the hospital, where other patients slept on the floor and he in a chair because there weren’t enough beds, as “like a halfway house” and lamented that “we’re not in a third world country”. South-western Sydney health district apologised for his excessive wait.

The NSW government hopes that a $130 million investment in 22 new short-stay units at six hospitals – St George, Campbelltown, Nepean, Maitland, John Hunter and Wyong – will provide some relief.

The short-stay units provide spaces for patients who have been triaged and assessed by emergency department staff, and require care and observation for between four and 24 hours. Patients remain under the care of the emergency department while beds remain free for the very sick.

NSW Premier Chris Minns said last week that the extra short-stay spaces would ease stress on busy emergency departments that were under “constant and sustained pressure”.

However, Australian Medical Association (NSW) president Dr Fred Betros called the units a “Band-Aid solution”.

According to the most recent data from the NSW Bureau of Health Information, there were 791,987 emergency presentations across the state from January to March this year. The figure represented a 0.9 per cent increase on the same time last year, and shows the scale of demand that hospitals face.

At Bankstown, 52.3 per cent of patients were seen on time, according to the quarterly statistics. Statewide, the figure was 68.4 per cent. The best performing hospital was Liverpool, on 78.6 per cent, while the worst was the billion-dollar Westmead Hospital . Just 41.5 per cent of its emergency patients started their treatment on schedule.

As Rasker points out, one in 10 patients across the state waited more than 24 hours to be treated and admitted to a ward or transferred to another hospital, an increase of two hours. The performance in western Sydney was even slower – one in 10 waited more than 33 hours to be admitted, a more than five-hour jump since the same time last year.

The NSW government blames emergency department overcrowding on an influx of elderly and disabled patients waiting for a federally funded NDIS or aged-care bed.

Voters are tired of the perennial blame game between the state and federal governments. Anybody facing excessively long waits at one of NSW’s hospitals won’t care if responsibility lies with Macquarie Street or Canberra, just as long as the problem is fixed.