You can watch people deteriorate

in front of your eyes

The NSW Parliament’s inquiry into ambulance ramping has found the proportion of cases attended by ambulances within 15 minutes has almost halved since 2016. The release of the latest Bureau of Health Information (BHI) this week confirms that people in New South Wales are still waiting too long for an ambulance and too long in Emergency Departments with 1 in 10 patients spending longer than 22 hours in Emergency before discharge – the longest of any quarter since BHI reporting began.

9 December 2022

ALAN HAYES

 

ANOTHER week another damning health report, this time into the state of affairs of the Perrottet Government’s promise to cut ambulance ramping across New South Wales.

 

The figures release show that only half the number of people, compared to five years ago, are treated within that important fifteen minutes by a paramedic. When they finally get to a hospital, because of ramping, only twenty percent of patients are being taken off the stretcher and admitted to the Emergency Department (ED) within the required thirty minute window.

 

There are now longer wait times for ambulances when people call triple 0 and when they do get into an ambulance, people are waiting longer at the hospital before they get a bed. Perrottet is playing the ‘Grim Reaper’ with people’s lives. The culmination of Perrottet’s failure to address the ambulance ramping and getting people into the ED is a reduction is critical health services – but it also puts an enormous amount of pressure on frontline paramedics, because they're forced to wait very long periods of time, sometimes hours on end at hospitals, before they're back out on the street, back out helping the community.

 

Across the state:

 

• 60,000 patients or 1 in every 12 walked into an Emergency Department in the last 3 months and left without, or before completing treatment.

 

• More than one in three Priority 1A patients, that is people with life threatening conditions like cardiac or respiratory arrest, waited longer than the 10-minute target for an ambulance to arrive.

 

• Almost half of critical emergency patients did not start their treatment on time.

 

• Almost 100,000 people were on elective surgery waiting lists at the end of September, including close to 18,000 who had waited longer than clinical guidelines say they should.

 

These figures show the dire state of our health system. It’s not fair on our hardworking healthcare professionals to have to manage a system that is stretched to its limits.

 

The report also found that between 2016 and 2022:

 

• The percentage of patients transferred from an ambulance to ED within 30 minutes has decreased by almost 20 per cent;

 

• The percentage of patients starting treatment on time fell from 76.4 per cent to 62.8 per cent; and

 

• The percentage of patients who spent four hours or less in the ED fell from 73.3 per cent to 57.6 per cent.

 

Emergency medicine staff specialist Dr James Tadros told the inquiry: "You can watch them deteriorate in front of your eyes just because you don't have any access to treatment for them."

 

The BHI Report comes after the release of The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s latest data, which found:

 

• The average wait time at a NSW emergency department from presentation to admission has increased 4 hours and 41 minutes in 2017 to 6 hours and 15 minutes.

 

• EDs in NSW are seeing 133,000 more people a year now, compared to five years ago.

 

• We have three fewer public hospital emergency departments than five years ago.

 

NSW Labor Leader Chris Minns said, “The wait times for ambulances and in our hospitals are now at record levels.”

 

“This is not a health system that is coping, after 12 years of under investment by the NSW Liberals.

 

“Our nurses, hospital staff, paramedics and doctors need more support."

 

If you think that the problem of ambulance ramping and long wait times for beds isn’t endemic on the Central Coast, you’re wrong. The Central Coast is being left behind by the Perrottet Government when it comes top health care.

 

NSW Shadow Healkth Minister, Ryan Park said, “This latest report only confirms what too many of us already know, that our hospital system has fallen into crisis after 12 years of Liberals and Nationals.

 

“The Liberals and Nationals are in denial about the state of our hospital system, and refuse to acknowledge the severity of the situation.

 

“But ask anyone who has called an ambulance or has been in an emergency department recently, and they know too well the reality of long wait times and people simply giving up and leaving untreated.

 

“This data does not paint  a picture of a healthy system."