Public hospitals across the Mid North Coast have continued to improve across several key areas of emergency department and elective surgery performance.
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Mid North Coast Local Health District Chief Executive Stewart Dowrick said 77 per cent, or 22,790, of patients left EDs across the district within four hours of arriving in the July to September quarter, an improvement of 1.4 percentage points, or 1,023 people, compared with last winter, according to the latest Bureau of Health Information report.
“We have also seen improvement in the percentage of patients being transferred from the care of an ambulance to the emergency department within the 30-minute benchmark, up almost two percentage points to 88.9 or 5,919 patients, which is 165 more patients compared with last year,” he said.
The smaller district hospitals have continued to perform well with both Macksville and Kempsey Hospitals improving or remaining stable across all triage categories.
“We acknowledge the hard work of our clinicians and multi-disciplinary teams in improving waiting times for patients visiting our emergency departments,” Mr Dowrick said.
Mr Dowrick said the BHI Healthcare Quarterly also reports on elective surgery performance across the district. The MNCLHD continues to make very effective use of its Network operations between its larger base hospitals and smaller district facilities.
“Again, our smaller hospitals have continued to assist the larger sites by taking on an increased volume of day surgical procedures such as colonoscopies and cataract surgery. This allows our larger hospitals more complex surgery such as major orthopaedic and urological procedures,” he said.
Between June 2012 and June 2018 MNCLHD has increased its workforce by an additional 686 full time equivalent staff – an increase of more than 25 per cent including 88 more doctors and 306 more nurses.
The 2018-19 budget for MNCLHD is more than $634 million, an increase of nearly $28 million on the 2017-18 annualised budget.
BHI chief executive Dr Diane Watson said the latest issue of Healthcare Quarterly compares results from July to September 2018, when there was a relatively mild flu season, to the same quarter in 2017, when there was a severe flu season.
“While we need to take this year’s milder flu season into consideration when looking at these results, it is still encouraging to see results at NSW level have improved compared with the same quarter last year,” Dr Watson said.
However, the improvements at NSW level were not reflected across all public hospitals.
“The report shows while many hospitals have improved the timeliness of care in their emergency departments, others have not improved or their performance has declined. Hospitals can look at these results, including those of their peers, and see where there are opportunities to improve,” Dr Watson said.
Median waiting times for elective surgery in NSW public hospitals were 11 days for urgent procedures in the July to September 2018 quarter (up one day compared to the same quarter last year), 44 days for semi-urgent procedures (up one day) and 228 days for non-urgent surgeries (up 15 days). Almost all (97.6%) elective surgical procedures were performed within clinically recommended timeframes.
