Presentations to emergency departments in Tasmanian hospitals have accelerated at twice the rate of the increase in hospital beds over the past decade, the Tasmania head of the Australiasian College for Emergency Medicine says.
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A parliamentary inquiry is looking into pressures in emergency departments and the delay of patient transfer, otherwise known as ambulance ramping.
Ambulance ramping occurs when paramedics are unable to transfer patients to clinical care in a hospital's emergency department.
ACEM state faculty chairman Juan Ascensio-Lane has said patient capacity in hospitals needed improvement to attain occupancy rate goals of 90 per cent to allow for surge capacity.
"Too often hospital systems are being run near 100-per-cent ward occupancy rather than systems that encourage total ward occupancy closer to 85 to 90 per cent," he said.
"It is increasingly clear that government investment in workforce and infrastructure is simply not keeping up with demand."
Dr Ascensio-Lane said between 2011-12 and 2021-22, Tasmanian emergency departments recorded a 68-per-cent increase of patients requiring hospital admission.
He said this increase was more than two times higher than the average of 32 per cent across Australia.
Dr Ascensio-Lane said over the same period, the number of available beds in Tasmanian public hospitals increased by just 33 per cent.
He said patient flow could be improved through changes regarding admission and discharge of a patient.
At present, medical consultants are often the only people that can do this.
"As their workload has increased, they often are unable to round on all their admitted patients each day," Dr Ascensio-Lane said.
"This means many patients are stuck in the ED waiting for a plan."
He said there was a need to extend this role to appropriate allied health care workers as necessary.
Australian Medical Association president John Saul in a submission to the select committee Tasmania's patient transfer performance had deteriorated year-on-year since at least 2015-16.
He said in the 2021-22, 57.4 per cent of patients taken to the Royal Hobart Hospital by ambulance were offloaded within 15 minutes and 58.8 per cent were offloaded within 15 minutes at the Launceston General Hospital.
At the RHH that year, 65.7 per cent were offloaded within 30 minutes and 64.6 per cent at the LGH.
Political reporter for Australian Community Media, based in Hobart.
Political reporter for Australian Community Media, based in Hobart.
