Canberra Hospital Ranked 15th Busiest Australian Public Hospital

From what I understand, staffing in the ACT (in so far as nurses and doctors) didn’t drop or rise dramatically after Royal Canberra closed. The services provided by Royal Canberra simply shifted, largely to TCH – so TCH became larger, more diverse (in service provision) and more busy as a result. The labour force, territory wide, however, didn’t get much bigger – and hasn’t grown sufficiently enough to address needs since.

It didn’t seem to be be so busy before they demolished the other hospital.

The comment about John James further up is actually salutary. a fully private hospital is kind-of like a medical hotel. Your surgeon/doctor visits it, based on their patients there.

If you have an Op. and then spring a leak or something starts to go wrong later, they have to ambulance you to a public hosptial where there’s doctors on the staff!

Apologies for the triple post, but the following is a great insight into what’s going on at present – highly recommended:

http://www.impactednurse.com/?p=517

…And it’s official – I suck at HTML tags.

imhotep said :

Wrong. YOU try sitting in a cold, uncomfortable waiting room with a sick child for hours on end. Have we reached a situation where staff regard anyone who will ‘survive’ until morning as non-urgent?

When the acute area of the ED is full of people who [i]won’t[/i] survive if they don’t get attention – then yes, the people with discomfort and misery, but no life-threatening problems will be left until later. It sounds harsh, but essentially, there’s a difference between what the public (and health care professionals) perceives as appropriate triage, and how the system must triage according to the whittled down resources currently afforded to it. Let’s get one thing straight: nobody goes into nursing or medicine with the intent to ignore somebody in distress. The opposite is true – most people pursue this path with the desire to help people in times of need. We don’t take delight in not being able to deliver top-notch care – the fact that we [i]can’t[/i] is much of the reason for staff morale being as crappy as it is. We don’t like the fact that people have to wait – both to be seen, and to get a bed on the wards. And before you try telling me to sit in an ED waiting room – save your breath. I’ve been on both sides of the fence – as a health care consumer, and as one of the people working in the ED. I know what you’re talking about.

The idea of opening more emergency departments is a little short sighted. The health care crisis is NOT limited to the emergency departments. Opening more departments won’t affect patient care in the end. Staff shortages are across the board, not just the ED. The reason we hear so much about the ED is because a) it’s the public face of the hospital – it’s the first point of contact for the public, but merely reflects what’s going on in a bigger sense and b) waiting times and bed block are a quantifiable measure by which political parties are judged, therefore, we hear a lot about them in the media. If we moved more of our medical and nursing staff down to ED, or opened a whole new department, and ensured [i]every[/i] patient who presented to the ED was seen immediately, where do you think the admitted patients would go? The problem is lack of flow – access block is the real problem. It’s our ability to find them a bed on the ward, to get timely access to investigations and treatments for inpatients, to find theatre time to operate on them, and to move patients through and out of beds after treatment – that’s where the issue lies. If there’s no room inside a house, it’s only natural that you see a bunch of visitors hanging around at the front door, because they can’t move any further. That is essentially what you see in our ED.

gun street girl said :

The people who come to the ED, wait for a few hours, then go home rarely come back. Why? They aren’t that sick to begin with.

Wrong. YOU try sitting in a cold, uncomfortable waiting room with a sick child for hours on end. Have we reached a situation where staff regard anyone who will ‘survive’ until morning as non-urgent?

I was an emergency admission myself at TCH 2 years ago (road accident). I I remember being parked in a corridor waiting for XRAY next to an old woman who was calling softly for help from the time I was parked there until the time I left, about an hour later. NO-ONE stopped to see how she was.

I remember being in the ward at night, listening to the ‘overworked’ staff at the nurse’s station doing bugger-all for most of their shift. I left vowing never to return.

Morale at TCH is bad, and I believe it reflects on patient care. If I’m sick, send me to St Vincent’s in Sydney. I don’t care if I die on the way.

Ummm, nice idea peter@home. However, you need doctors on site 24 hrs to have an Emergency Dept, CJJMH, as a private hospital, doesn’t have doctors on site after hours.
They always have to be called in. Thats why we all go to TCH or Calvary if we need medical care after hours.

How about some of the GP’s in this town bulk bill? Now there’s a novel idea, so those of us that dutifully pay our medicare levy every year can access a GP and not have to pay $60 up front. Thats why ED’s are busy, as half the people there should be in their GP’s waiting room but can’t or wont cough up the cash up front. Then those who need emergency care wouldn’t be crowded out by those with sniffly noses etc. I remember hearing a story at a party of a person who called an ambulance and went to ED @ because she hadn’t had a shit for 5 days. I’m serious. One giant turd later she was sent home again.
Just to cheer you all up!

Look, the one thing that would help us all out would be for the JJMH to open an emergency section. I am fairly certain that it has been considered, and would alleviate some of the load on TCH. another option would be to build a hospital down south – this would enable cooma patients to come to a closer location, and allow the ANU to have more expansion for their medical school.

If I am paying for more beds / doctors etc, I want them to provide them.

It is neither a good nor a bad thing. It all depends upon how good the care is, not how busy the place is. The hospital is quite large compared to many in the country, so it is no surprise it is so busy.