Patients in the Queanbeyan Hospital emergency department are being seen faster this year than in 2016, according to data released last week.
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Queanbeyan Hospital has recorded decreased emergency department wait times across all ED admission categories.
The Bureau of Health Information (BHI) data, which covers the January to March quarter, shows patients admitted to Queanbeyan ED waited up to 33 minutes less to begin treatment than they did in the previous quarter.
The figures also showed Queanbeyan Hospital discharged 87.5 per cent of patients within four hours, which was the health department standard, and was slightly above the 86.6 per cent achieved by other similar-sized hospitals.
General manager of the Queanbeyan Hospital, Nicola Yates, said the results reflected a dedicated effort by Queanbeyan staff to improve wait times.
“The work that has gone on in the emergency department in the last 12 to 18 months has been to ensure all our processes are efficient and that we’ve got the right number of staff on at the right time of day,” Ms Yates said.
“Our first priority is making sure patients get the appropriate clinical care. Then the second priority is making sure we do that as quickly as possible.”
The Queanbeyan emergency department admits more patients than any other hospital in the southern NSW local health district. It is on target to have 18,000 presentations in 2017.
In each of the four emergency department patient categories Queanbeyan registered wait times shorter than the average times in peer group hospitals.
Despite the positive results in the emergency department, the BHI data showed wait times for elective surgery in Queanbeyan had risen.
The median wait time for patients requiring non-urgent surgery was 94 days in the January to March quarter, up from 69 days in the final quarter of 2016.
However the hospital still fell well within the NSW Health mandated wait time of 365 days for non-urgent elective surgery.
It also compared favourably to the median wait time of 179 days recorded in peer group hospitals.
According to Ms Yates, the longer wait times for elective surgery were due to a substantial increase in patients attending Queanbeyan Hospital.
In the opening quarter of 2017 there were 38 patients requiring urgent elective surgery (required in 30 days or less); this was up significantly on the 18 urgent surgeries performed in the previous quarter.
Ms Yates said the dramatic increase could be explained by Queanbeyan Hospital recruiting more surgeons and by working with ACT Health to ensure NSW residents no longer had to be treated in Canberra.
“We are trying to make sure that anybody that lives in NSW gets treated in a NSW facility,” she said.
“This means they wait a much shorter time [than if treated in the ACT] if they’re willing to come and have their procedure in Queanbeyan.”