“So that’s tens of thousands of Queenslanders who’ve been treated because we are not in lockdown,and we’re not dealing with lots of cases.”
It followsan apparent public disagreement between the Premier and the Chief Health Officer over whether hospitals could cope with a COVID surge.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk,making the case for more federal funding,talked up the risk to hospitals of a wave of COVID cases,while just a few minutes later CHO Jeannette Young insisted they were well-equipped and staffed and could handle anything the pandemic threw at them.
The Australian Medical Association Queensland has called for real-time ambulance ramping and available bed data to be made public as part of broader efforts to fix apparent holes in the hospital system ahead of any surge of virus cases.
The AMAQ is holding a “Ramping Roundtable” for the third time this week,with emergency specialists,surgeons and doctors gathering to discuss the issue.
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Emergency physician and roundtable chair Dr Kim Hansen said there was a “real threat” that hospitals would be overwhelmed as they were in NSW and Victoria during their outbreaks.
“We need our hospitals at 90 per cent capacity to allow the flow of those in emergency departments through the hospital system,” Dr Hansen said.
“It’s imperative we have an action plan developed this year,but we must be fully armed with data and collaboration.”
Dr Young said data on bed availability did flow through in real-time to the parts of the health system which needed that information.
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“We do have real-time data. So we manage it,” she said.
“That’s why ambulances don’t always necessarily go to their closest hospital,sometimes they are diverted to other hospitals because we have that real time data of hospital demand and the ambulance demand.”
Dr Young also admitted when asked that they were working with a “very small number” of health staff who were refusing to get vaccinated,although she could not say exactly how many.
“There are a very small number of reasons that people can’t be vaccinated … so we’re just working through whether these people have one of those conditions,” she said.
“[We’ll then decide] whether we need to look to redeploy them,or what we need to do.”