Tamworth hospital surgery wait lists grow, while emergency wait times drop

The Bureau of Health Information (BHI) released its quarterly report for March to June 2016, which crunches the numbers for the state’s hospital emergency department (ED), elective surgery and admission performances. The number of ED visits and surgeries performed rose for Tamworth’s hospital, compared with the same quarter in 2015.

The list of people waiting for surgery at Tamworth grew by 21.9 per cent in 12 months, a total of 292 patients. But hospital staff appear to be on top of the rapid growth with over 99 per cent of surgeries performed in the recommended time-frame.

“We’re still achieving the benchmarks, but it’s something we’ll keep monitoring,” Peel sector general manager Catharine Death said.

At the end of June, there were 1624 people waiting for an operation at Tamworth hospital and Ms Death said it hard to pin down the stimulus for the rapid growth.

“It’s hard to say, it could be around changing demographics,” she said.

“We’ll see where it goes, but at the moment we’re able to meet the community’s demands.”

Tamworth hospital’s ED saw more 178 patients in autumn 2016, compared with 2015, with 10,273 people coming through the doors, but the BHI’s figures showed staff were more than up for the task.

The hospital saw 71.8 per cent of patients transferred from the ED within four hours, an improvement of 10.1 per cent on last year.

“The results are fantastic and I couldn’t be happier,” Ms Death said.

“The four hour benchmark is very important. We put a lot of focus on that, because it’s about getting people where they need to be, whether its home or in hospital.

“We watch these measures everyday, because it’s the KPI that measures patient experience.”

The time taken to transfer ambulance arrivals to ED care was listed at 10 minutes, marking a reduction of five minutes compared with 2015’s stats.