Queenslanders are being urged by the state’s Health Minister not to go hospital unless it is a medical emergency, with almost every public facility in the south-east at capacity.
Key points:
- Patients will be told if their elective surgery has been cancelled
- The Australasian College for Emergency Medicine believes the system is in crisis
- A Sunshine Coast GP is worried patient lives will be put at risk
The State Government has released $3 million in emergency funds as it scrambles to deal with the “unprecedented” pressure on Queensland’s public hospital beds.
Chief health officer Jeannette Young said the hospital system was not in crisis “because we’re responding to it”.
But Simon Judkins, the president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said the situation would lead to sicker patients and even deaths.
“These conditions have a direct impact on patient morbidity and mortality. If that’s not a crisis, I don’t know what is,” Dr Judkins said.
“I think it is a crisis because we know that staff are suffering, we know that patients are suffering, we know there’s adverse outcomes and increasing aggression and violence.”
A Sunshine Coast doctor said the waitlist and bed blockage issue could become a matter of life and death.
Nambour GP Dr Wayne Herdy said one of his patients could die if her treatment was further delayed.
“Some people’s health is so adversely affected that something will happen or will become impossible to fix, including one 90-year-old patient of mine,” he said.
“She looks like she has bowel cancer and was sent in for a colonoscopy as a category one patient.
“That means she should be seen in 30 days, but she is on a six-month wait and she is not going to survive that, it will be too far gone.”
But Dr Young said pressure had started to ease on the hospital network by Wednesday afternoon.
“This morning we opened up 30 beds at the Mater [Hospital] … and the Mater started taking increased numbers of patients from the catchment area overnight and through today,” she said.
“We’ve seen our hospitals gradually able to decompress — they’ve seen a lowering of the numbers of patients coming through the emergency department.”
Dr Young said only a handful of elective surgeries had been cancelled.
She said the cause of the spike in demand was unknown.
“We know we’ve had one of the hottest summers ever and we know heat causes health conditions to get worse, and [we] have also seen a lot more flu cases than [expected this time of year],” she said.
“[On Tuesday] afternoon it came to a head where every hospital was at full capacity … they’d opened up every single bed they could possibly open, they cancelled what surgery they could and they really didn’t have any other strategies that they could use.
“Everyone’s getting a bed but they’re getting a bed in places we wouldn’t normally put people.”
Dr Young said elective surgery was being cancelled.
“Unless it’s critical surgery, it’s being cancelled and people will have to be rescheduled,” she said.
But she said patients should not assume their elective surgeries had been cancelled until they were told.
“There is some that’s such a high priority it needs to go ahead, there are others that can be postponed,” she said.
Gold Coast Health’s director of emergency medicine David Green said it was very difficult for emergency departments on the coast to cope with the numbers of patients.
“Over the last two days I think we saw 370-odd patients on Monday and 352 yesterday,” Dr Green said.
“They’re unprecedented amounts where it’s very difficult to cope, to get that number through.
“The Gold Coast University Hospital is now the biggest — in terms of attendances — emergency department in the entire country.”
Dr Herdy said he did not believe a rise in flu and heatstroke notifications throughout hospitals and GP clinics was the cause of the problem.
“There was an unseasonal flu that went through about a month ago, which caused a bit of extra workload, but not so much at the hospitals,” he said.
“We also did not see that much heatstroke … so something else is happening here.”
Health Minister Steven Miles said the emergency funding injection would be used to open up more beds in private and public hospitals.
“We have provided an additional $3 million to our HHS [Health and Hospital Service] to identify and open up any possible capacity across the public and private systems,” he said yesterday.
Dr Young said talks were underway about accessing an extra 50 beds in the private sector.
“They’ll be online in the next couple of days … they need to be staffed, they need to be commissioned,” she said.
We can’t put bandaids over issues, nurses say
Beth Mohle of the Queensland Nurses Union said the system could not continue to run at full capacity, and structural issues needed to be addressed.
“We need to go to the root cause and not just put bandaids over the issues as they arise,” she said.
“I think this is a multifaceted and complex issue and I think it’s good we are having a response to the current immediate crisis that we have.
“But we’ve got to move out of reactive mode and develop short, medium and long-term strategies to address this.
“There’s a whole lot of issues in relation to the inter-relationship with nursing homes, with NDIS, with primary health care.
“People are under so much financial pressure in the community … people can’t necessarily afford to go to their GP.”
Dr Judkins said the increased demand was not surprising, and it was a problem being felt in emergency departments across the country.
“We aren’t catering for this growth and investing in staff to be able to cope in increasing demand,” he said.
Sunshine Coast University Hospital and the hospitals at Nambour, Maleny and Gympie are all operating as normal.
Featured Image: Dr David Green said it was difficult for Gold Coast emergency departments to cope with patient volume.(Supplied)