'Extreme' pressures at the Royal Hobart Hospital's emergency department this week are starting to impact even patients from the north and north-west traveling down for surgery, a director of the Australian Medical Association said.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
AMA spokesman Dr Michael Lumsden-Steel said every morning this week, between 30 and 40 patients have been waiting for hours to get beds in the hospital, with the backlog resulting in the cancellation of "lifesaving surgeries" and exacerbating strain on the system.
"We're not even in winter yet and we are seeing critical bed pressures being placed on the Royal Hobart Hospital," Dr Lumsden-Steel said.
He said only 60 to 70 per cent of patients arriving by ambulance have been offloaded within the required 60-minute time limit in recent days.
That was well down from the 80 per cent figure quoted by Ambulance Tasmania Jordan Emery for the weekend prior to the start of the 60-minute mandated offload protocol last week.
"Over the last two weeks we've had bed pressures in the hospital system leading to multiple patients having to have major surgery cancelled," Dr Lumsden-Steel said.
"We know today that patients that should have been having open heart surgery and bypass surgery haven't been able to have that because there's no ICU capacity."
He said federal and state governments needed to get together "to identify what the funding shortfalls are and get on with coming up with a funding solution".
"Because right now we are just rolling from crisis to crisis, patients having their surgery cancelled, patients having to travel down from the north of the state to have their surgery delayed or rescheduled for the next day.
"That's not a good thing, because that then blocks someone else and puts a backlog on the waitlist."
He likened current efforts to solve the problem to treating wounds with band aids.
He said nurses and doctors were more focussed on finding solutions to the patient flow issues than patient care.
"Our efficiency is down because they can't move patients through the hospital.
"There's too many staff spending their time trying to find solutions instead of getting on with patient care."