Page 307 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 9 February 2021
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about how we improve the emergency department performance. Part of that has been about the rest of the hospital, and how we improve the flow through the emergency department into the hospital. That is the timely care strategy that we have talked about a number of times.
I also acknowledged on radio—and this goes to the exact question by the Leader of the Opposition—in my interview, which was a 10-minute sit-down interview with a journalist, of which, as you are aware, Madam Speaker, a very short amount was played, that we are trying to deliver change in a very busy, 24/7 environment. It is not just at Canberra Hospital; it is also at Calvary. Canberra Hospital has one of the busiest emergency departments in the country. It sees a lot of different types of activity. We then need to change processes within that 24/7 environment. We will continue to work to do that. We have a range of strategies in place. If October comes around and we have not, I guess we will see what happens.
MS LEE: Minister, given that your government has failed to meet these targets for several years now, what is different this time?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: As I was saying, we have taken a very whole-of-hospital and whole-of-system approach to this. We have focused, within the rest of the hospital, outside the emergency department, on ensuring that people can be discharged in a timely way. The red-to-green strategy identifies barriers to discharge and gets patients discharged from the hospital in a timely way, to free up those beds in the rest of the hospital for the emergency department, to address what is commonly known as bed block. There are still some issues when we have high levels of mental health patients, but across the rest of the hospital that strategy is now working extremely well.
To connect the emergency department to the rest of the hospital, we have established a process in both Calvary and Canberra hospitals so that they are now doing direct admissions into wards. That enables people within the emergency department to admit onto a hospital ward rather than having to wait for a consultant to come down from the rest of the hospital to agree to that admission.
There is rapid assessment by senior clinicians to improve the flow through the emergency department and identify when people do need to be admitted. There is increased sharing of information, looking at what other jurisdictions are doing in their emergency departments, so that we can learn from where other jurisdictions have had success within the emergency department.
A range of things have been considered within the emergency department itself, from the beginning of triage right through to the fast-track process, and having senior clinicians in charge of ensuring that people get through the process where they are going to be discharged from the emergency department to home, and having someone at the back end who is really in charge of making sure that those people who are going to be admitted are being admitted in a timely way. So it really is a whole-of-hospital at Canberra Hospital and a whole-of-system with Calvary approach to addressing this issue.
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