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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3533 ..

We, the ACT faculty of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine regretfully draw to the attention of interested parties a progressively worsening problem with Emergency Department overcrowding in the ACT. It is our collective opinion that patients’ lives are being endangered to an unacceptable degree at an unacceptable frequency.

The current conditions in Emergency Departments at The Canberra Hospital and Calvary Health Care have deteriorated so profoundly over the last five years that we are unable to adequately and safely guide our patients through what to most is one of the most stressful experiences in their lives. As a result, we are seeing increased attrition of Emergency physicians, trainees, and emergency nursing staff to other areas of medicine.

Our conclusion is that while some mitigation of the problem has been obtained by further improvements in efficiency, the solution also must be addressed at its root, which we believe to be a situation where inpatient beds per 100,000 population ratios are simply too low to meet the needs of the community. The ACT in 2004 possesses only 57% of the available beds in 1988. This is despite an increase in the population and an increasingly elderly population. There must also be a whole of hospital approach to the issues of access block as shown by other Health Departments and hospitals.

Therefore we, the ACT faculty of the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine, would like to bring to your attention the following:

They list the paper on access block, their own views on access block and the New South Wales Auditor-General’s performance audit on transport and treatment of emergency patients in the New South Wales department of health. They go on to make a number of recommendations. I think I need to refer to some salient points. The submission states:

We all remember when hospitals we worked in were not affected by access block and overcrowding yet now it is common and even cynically described as the ‘new normal’. This is not due to lack of efficiency, but is multi-factorial and must change. It must not under any circumstances be accepted as a ‘new normal’—

this is what the emergency specialists in this town are telling us—

as it results in poor standards of patient care and high levels of risk for both patients and staff.

We hear about this all the time. Even today people have talked to me about friends who have been bypassed to Queanbeyan. Just by coincidence, a friend of people who are in the gallery at this moment was bypassed to Queanbeyan with a cerebral haemorrhage. This was a desperate situation and desperate friends had to hijack the ED to get service. This is not good enough. If the minister says, “This is the best in the country,” it is still not good enough. Because people in Sydney or people in other developed countries may have worse circumstances than ours, it does not in any way excuse the appalling service that we receive in this town.

I seek leave to table the letter and attachments from the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine.

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