With issues ranging from low-staff morale, complaints that management was not listening to staff requests, to the chemotherapy under-dosing scandal involving Dr John Grygiel. It has been a tough time.

To a degree this has over-shadowed the good work being done every day by workers and management at the Orange Health Service (OHS).

The release of the Bureau of Health Information’s Quarterly Report for July-September 2016 serves as an important reminder that amid the problems, there’s still plenty of good news to be had.

It’s good news for Health Minister Jillian Skinner as well who said the figures reveal the strongest performance by NSW hospitals in a winter quarter so there’s plenty of good news to spread around.

It found that 71.5 per cent of patients spent four hours or less in emergency departments across NSW – a significant increase over the 57.5 per cent achieved in the same period in 2011.

But the news is better for Orange as it shows the OHS figure to be above the state average at just under 74 per cent. And that’s an improvement over the 71.9 per cent figure achieved at OHS just one year ago.

For anyone who had the misfortune to need to attend any hospital’s emergency department it is not somewhere you want to spend a lot of time. Cutting that down is good news indeed.

And as OHS general manager Catherine Nowlan pointed out it has been achieved in the face of a 25 per cent increase in the number of true emergency patients (that is those people suffering the likes of chest pain and severe burns) presenting to the Emergency Department at Orange.

“The Emergency Department has treated more emergency patients, received  more patients via ambulance, whilst decreasing the time patients stayed in the Emergency Department with more patients being treated and leaving the ED within  four hours,” she said.   

She said the results were the result of whole service working together as one professional team. 

It was also positive to see that the number of people presenting with non-urgent and semi-urgent conditions including small cuts and earache had fallen by nine per cent on the previous year. But even they received faster service.