Eight years after it proposed building operations centres in its main hospitals, the Southern District Health Board is poised to finally make progress on those plans.
The idea for the centres, which would monitor patient flow through the hospital and identify more quickly when a bed-block situation was looming, was dusted off after the board suffered severe and ongoing difficulties in getting enough patients discharged from hospital to make way for new patients arriving in emergency departments.
The SDHB’s hospital advisory committee was told yesterday a patient flow manager had already been appointed for each hospital, and that they were working alongside a Ministry of Health-funded project manager.
Likewise, a possible location in Southland Hospital had been rejected as not fit for purpose because it was not big enough for the planned screens which would show patient and ward status in real time.
SDHB chairman Pete Hodgson asked if the process actually had begun in 2014 — "are we really that bad?" — and also questioned whether a proposal that the Dunedin centre could be spread across several rooms was workable.
Chief executive Chris Fleming acknowledged that there had been a long delay, but said in any organisation the size of the SDHB would probably have projects that had started that long ago and were unfinished.
"Several individual components have been delivered, but they haven’t been consolidated into one integrated centre."
Mr Brown said that like a lot of services in Dunedin Hospital, moving one thing would probably require moving several other things as well, and finding a sufficiently large single usable space was certainly difficult.
A report to the board also said that several other expected components of the centre were never progressed, partly because funding for staffing could not be secured at the time.
"Patient flow and patient access problems are identified issues in all hospitals internationally, and the co-ordination of such via an integrated operations centre is the contemporary approach."
The centres were intended to be in a central location from which the day’s activities in each hospital could be co-ordinated, and use technology so managers could make informed decisions about admission and discharge, and planners could forecast patient flow during potentially busy times such as public holidays.
Eventually, it was envisaged that the system would also incorporate rural hospitals, mental health facilities, and community, primary and hospital services.
In response to a question from board member Lyndell Kelly, Mr Brown said a large operations centre was already in the plans for the new Dunedin Hospital.
