Orange Hospital emergency wait times decline in late 2020, elective surgery backlog on track

Elective surgeries were put on hold across the country to free up capacity amid the COVID-19 pandemic with more than 700 procedures delayed at Orange alone, but the facility has already made progress to complete those surgeries.

With all but the most-urgent procedures delayed there was reductions in the number of elective surgeries performed between April and October, however the BHI's Healthcare Quarterly report noted an increase in the final quarter.

While the percentage of non-urgent and semi-urgent procedures performed on time was well down throughout they did steadily increase as the year went on, with 100 per cent of urgent elective surgeries performed on time too.

"Our performance, at times, was always going to be affected through the COVID-19 pandemic response," Orange Hospital general manager Catherine Nowlan said.

"We have already made a significant effort in recovering some of those elective surgery wait times and we're hopeful we will have fully caught up in April.

"We were so lucky to work together as a health community to control and contain the COVID-19 situation, people want to have confidence the hospital has appropriate disaster responses in place and that was strongly, and successfully, led by respective medical leads."

The quarterly report, released on Wednesday alongside the BHI's Healthcare In Focus report, revealed that impact was felt across the board, but also showed hospital activity is returning to pre-pandemic levels.

Particularly in terms of patients presenting at emergency and the wait times they experienced.

Between October and December 8,770 people presented at Orange Hospital's emergency department, which marked a 6.9 per cent decrease from the quarter directly prior, a 32 per cent decline was noted in terms of non-urgent presentations too.

However, compared to that July-September quarter, regardless of triage category the average time to receive treatment did increase slightly as did the median time for release after presentation, the former by minutes and the latter by more than half an hour.

In a direct comparison with the same period in the previous year, however, patients were largely receiving treatment faster and being released quicker as well.

While there was a slight increase of two minutes for patients presenting with urgent conditions, the wait times those in the emergency, semi-urgent and non-urgent triage categories all either reduced or remained the same.

There was a notable, 10-minute decrease in the time non-urgent presentations received treatment.

In total, 79.5 per cent of emergency patients received treatment on time which was a slight improvement on the previous year, although there was a marginal decrease in those being released within four hours of presentation.

"We're extremely pleased, I'm incredibly proud we've been able to continue delivering appropriate, quality healthcare," Ms Nowlan said.

"We've worked with clinicians and all the healthcare teams to deliver and improve on those services post our COVID-response."

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: