20 new emergency beds left empty at RCH due to staffing shortage: leaked email

Twenty new emergency beds at the Royal Children’s Hospital will be left empty when a long-awaited, multimillion-dollar redevelopment is completed in November because the health service lacks the staff to use them, a damning leaked internal email reveals.

In a scathing memo sent to staff earlier this month, the hospital’s director of emergency medicine, Dr Stuart Lewena, accused the state government of turning down a desperate funding request for more frontline doctors and nurses be able to open the beds, despite record numbers of sick children flooding to the health service.

“On the 10th of November, the builders will be gone, and the 20 additional beds will be ours,” Lewena wrote in internal email sent to staff on September 11. “Unfortunately, we will not be able to open any of them due to lack of staff.”

The senior doctor warned that patient care for Victorian children was already being impacted by severe staffing shortage and chronic under-resourcing.

He alleged the government had rejected a “responsible and modest” request for operational funding to allow the 20 beds to be opened and staffed.

“Despite our best efforts, the standard of care we would like to deliver and believe our patients deserve [is] being compromised,” he wrote.

The 20-bed expansion was intended to be a turning point after years of overcrowding at hospital and was meant to increase the department’s capacity by about 50 per cent.

“It is not enough just to build new facilities. They must be able to operate,” he wrote to staff.

Lewena said the emergency department had been plagued by “flawed planning” since moving into its current building in 2011, which was originally built for 60,000 children a year.

By 2018, it was treating more than 80,000 children every year, forcing staff to expand into nearby spaces and work in areas never designed for emergency medicine, he said.

“Since moving into this building in 2011, our ED has been grossly undersized for the size of the work to be performed,” Lewena said.

Lewena said the emergency department at Victoria’s major specialist paediatric and flagship hospital had exceeded its capacity within the first year of relocating to its new building at Flemington Road in Parkville.

He warned the hospital’s emergency department was now treating about 90,000 children a year, roughly 50 per cent more than the 60,000 annual presentations the existing department was designed to accommodate.

The senior doctor also lashed the government over suggestions that the pressure mounting on the hospital could be alleviated by diverting children with less serious conditions away from its emergency department.