31 August 2020
The ANMF (SA Branch) is calling on Health Minister Wade and SA Health to urgently address issues associated with patient flow to avoid preventable deaths or harm to patients.
We are repeatedly seeing our major hospitals overcapacity, with insufficient numbers of senior nurses and doctors available to manage the flow patient of patients, seven days a week.
There have been unprecedented numbers of people waiting in emergency departments for a bed over the last five days, culminating in nearly 140 individuals not receiving appropriate medical care yet.
Despite the gravity of this, there seems to be no response from the Minister or SA Health.
“These rates of overcapacity are partly a result of patients not being assessed and discharged by senior nurses and doctors over the weekend. This creates a terrible, yet predictable domino effect,” said ANMF (SA Branch) CEO/Secretary Adj Associate Professor Elizabeth Dabars AM.
“It is significantly reducing the capacity of emergency departments to assess and manage new patients.
“We have been advocating for over two years for there to be senior nurses and doctors available on the weekends to help facilitate required complex care as well as the discharging of patients.
“Week after week we see a build-up of people waiting for discharge over the weekend which creates an overflow of people stuck in emergency departments waiting for beds on Monday.
"Surely Minister Wade appreciates that medical issues don’t simply occur Monday to Friday and as such our hospitals can’t continually run with inadequate staffing over the weekend. It places an unfair burden on staff and ultimately puts patients at unacceptable risk,’’ Ms Dabars said.
The ANMF is particularly concerned that even when there is some available bed capacity, there are not enough staff to provide care, rendering them useless.
“At the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, despite there being 16 empty beds, people are being forced to wait for treatment given there are not enough staff to makes these beds available,’’ Ms Dabars said.
“These people waiting for a bed will have to wait until this afternoon for enough nurses to be recruited to open the beds at 1pm.
“This situation was entirely predictable when bed numbers were reduced to create the 'flex capacity' last year without staffing numbers similarly available to meet the surges in demand.”
Over the last six months over 100 voluntary separation packages (VSPs) have been offered to nurses across our metropolitan hospitals, without a plan to ensure that the care provided by these staff could continue in their absence.
“It beggars belief that amid a pandemic SA Health thought is was appropriate to reduce the number of nurses available when the state of our emergency departments clearly indicates that our hospitals are woefully under resourced,'' Ms Dabars said.
“We were assured by senior hospital staff that the VSPs would not impact on the availability of patient care and safe staffing arrangements; clearly they were wrong.
“Despite SA Health’s apparent denial, we are hearing from our members that patients are being left to wait in ambulances or, even worse, are being placed in corridors without access to appropriate medical equipment or call bells. It is a disaster in the making.
“The Minister and SA Health need to act now to ensure that our hospitals are adequately staffed seven days a week so the number of beds available can be flexed immediately to meet demand,’’ Ms Dabars said.
“I honestly don’t know what the Minister is waiting for. I certainly don’t want to be in the position of reading a coroner’s report with recommendations that could have been easily enacted now.”