A Victorian government plan for paramedics to ”dump and run” at hospitals has been slammed by nurses and emergency doctors who say it will be unsafe for patients and staff.
As new figures revealed the time ambulances spent waiting at hospitals had almost doubled under the Coalition, doctors and nurses attacked a new policy for emergency departments to take immediate responsibility for patients who arrive with paramedics.
On Saturday, Health Minister David Davis said asking emergency departments to take patients off paramedics’ hands as soon as they arrived would reduce ambulances ”ramped” at hospitals, but he committed no specific extra resources for hospitals to speed treatment.
The president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, Dr Anthony Cross, said asking overwhelmed emergency department staff to accept more patients without adding hospital beds or staff would result in delayed assessments and more patients being treated in chairs and corridors, with less oversight.
While the critically ill would always receive priority, Dr Cross said, he feared those with less acute but potentially serious conditions would suffer under the plan. ”I really fear for elderly patients, because often the burden of disease they have with an element of dementia or perhaps language problems, means they are difficult to assess and spend a long time quietly languishing in a corner,” he said.
”They are also less resilient … so they suffer badly from being stuck in noisy, unfamiliar surroundings.”
The Victorian secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, Lisa Fitzpatrick, said the policy was ”lazy and ignorant” and would eventually result in paramedics feeling too scared to leave their patients in waiting rooms, where there were insufficient staff to safely treat them.
She said nurses could be exposed to more violence as they treated more patients in ill-equipped waiting rooms. ”It’s undignified, there’s no privacy, there’s no oxygen, there’s no suction, it’s just a disaster waiting to happen.”
The debate came as new data showed long delays in transferring patients from ambulances to emergency departments almost doubled in the past three years at 24 of Victoria’s hospitals. In 2009-10, paramedics spent 7020 hours a month in queues compared with 13,178 hours a month in the previous year.
Figures for 2012-13 released to the opposition under freedom of information laws show the longest delays were at Frankston hospital, where paramedics queued for an average 1275 hours a month. Ramping times were next-highest at Monash Medical Centre (1254 hours), Royal Melbourne Hospital (1169 hours), Austin Hospital (1156 hours) and Northern Hospital (1081 hours).
Labor’s parliamentary secretary for health, Wade Noonan, said the government’s strategy to shift the ambulance crisis onto over-stretched hospitals was bound to fail. ”Without the additional promised beds and staff, this dump-and-run policy will simply deepen the pressure on our failing health system,” he said.
