The Health and Community Services Union (HACSU) today raised serious concerns about the implementation of the ambulance offload (ramping) procedure at the state’s largest public hospital, the Royal Hobart Hospital.
Over the coming months, the state government target is to have 100% of all ambulance cases offloaded within 60 Minutes. Currently the overall target is set at 85%.
By way of explanation, the protocol has a staged % process over a period of time that has each hospital moving towards to 100% within a set number of days. The RHH implemented the procedure on 22 April 2024, therefore at the mandated 241-day mark (100%) the date will be 19 December 2024.
While it is accepted that during periods of increased demand or where there may be multi-casualty incidents these times may spike, HACSU is concerned at the progress with implementing procedures on a day-to-day basis at the RHH which, when compared with the other major Tasmanian hospitals, remains the poorest performer.
“Paramedics are continuously frustrated with delays in patient flow at the hospital. We are still seeing patients unnecessarily languishing in corridors at the RHH for hours on some occasions,” HACSU State Secretary Robbie Moore said.
“But the evidence is in - when it is escalated properly and activated through the mandated escalation pathway, the offload procedure works and we see patients moving out of the emergency department almost immediately. This is good for patients, it creates flow in the emergency department and gets our ambulances back into the community,” he added.
Given the ongoing problems paramedics are experiencing with ramping at the RHH, HACSU has called on the Secretary of the Department of Health to convene a round table of all stakeholders to cooperatively address the barriers preventing patient flow at the RHH and address what is a safety issue for patients, paramedics and emergency department staff.