Patients on stretchers for more than 14 hours and others regularly treated in corridors was leading to detrimental health outcomes and keeping ambulance crews from responding to new cases,emergency health specialists said.
President of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine president Dr Clare Skinner told the inquiry in every shift it was now normal that hospitals would experience difficulty offloading ambulances and instead treat patients in corridors and waiting rooms.
“That means it’s public,it’s not dignified,and it also seriously limits your ability to perform a proper medical examination ... it’s just not adequate,and it’s not safe,” she said.
“It’s like working with a conveyor belt full of things you can’t get to fast enough,but what’s on the conveyor belt is human distress and suffering.”
While she acknowledged “tremendous” and necessary health infrastructure spending by the government in recent years,she said there had not been concurrent investment in the staff needed to service hospitals at every level.
The upper house inquiry was established in July to examine the rising incidence of ambulance ramping – where paramedics are stuck outside hospitals waiting for hours to offload patients.