Middlemore reaches Govt target of shorter emergency stays

Middlemore Hospital has reached the new national health target of shorter patient stays in emergency departments just five months after it was introduced.

Health Minister Tony Ryall, who introduced the target following mounting evidence that the long ED stays now common for many were compromising care and causing deaths, visited Middlemore yesterday to acknowledge it's achieving the new standard.

The target, one of six set nationally for district health boards, specifies that 95 per cent of patients spend no more than six hours in the emergency department before they are admitted to a ward, transferred or discharged.

Middlemore, home to the busiest emergency-care centre in Australasia, achieved it last week, after more than a year of working towards it.

"We're very pleased with the progress we've made," the emergency care centre's clinical director, Dr Vanessa Thornton, said yesterday. "It has been through the support of a clinical-management partnership.

"We've had some new resources, in terms of new wards, more beds and an increase in staff, but the whole-of-hospital cultural [change], with everybody being engaged, has probably been our biggest factor.

"We've also had a lot of support from our chief executive [Geraint Martin] and the board."

When Mr Martin came to the Counties Manukau District Health Board from Britain's National Health Service in 2006, he told the Herald one of his top aims was to reduce patient waiting-times in the emergency care centre.

The emergency care centre has been edging towards the Government's new target since last year, reached it fleetingly in July, then more consistently for most of last week. In tandem, the practice of leaving patients on trolleys in corridors - widely considered undesirable - has been virtually eliminated.

Dr Thornton said it would be a challenge to maintain compliance with the target, but that was the aim and she believed it could be done.

She said it meant better care for patients.

"Instead of sitting in the emergency department, sometimes for up to 15 hours, they are on the wards being treated where they should be, or at home after treatment."

A number of studies have shown a correlation between shorter emergency stays and shorter hospital stays overall. Emergency specialists have estimated that ED overcrowding leads to about 400 deaths a year because patients are not treated quickly enough or are simply overlooked.

Mr Ryall intends to release the results from the first three months of operation under the new national health targets this month.

They will be published in newspapers as league tables comparing hospitals' performance.

The other five targets cover improved access to elective surgery, shorter waits for cancer treatment, immunisation of a greater percentage of children, providing quit-smoking help to more hospital and primary care patients and wider uptake of cardiovascular and diabetes checks.