Staying times at Dunedin Hospital's emergency department will be 12% improved by the end of next month, a report to go to the Southern District Health Board says.
The hospital has been languishing near the bottom of the country for the national health target which requires that 95% of patients stay no longer than six hours in emergency departments.
The hospital's performance has consistently been about 70% with the most recent result, that for March, a slight improvement on 71.91%.
The report, which is to go to the hospitals' advisory committee meeting today and the full board tomorrow, predicts a 12% improvement by the end of June, a further 10% by December and by June next year it is expected 97% of patients will be dealt with in the required time.
In its closed session, the hospitals' advisory committee will consider a preliminary report on a short-stay unit for those patients who might need short-term monitoring but not admitting to the hospital. The public session report suggests the predicted 10% improvement in the second half of the year would be due to such a unit.
Senior staff within the department have repeatedly said they do not consider significant improvements in the staying times will be possible without some type of short-stay unit.
Among the actions which are expected to produce improvements by the end of next month are the fast tracking of patients by a specialist, extra nurses rostered at nights, a special admitting registrar, a rapid assessment and treatment project, better discharge procedures, and speeding up scans.
The final improvements, next year, would involve redesigning how orthopaedic patients proceed through the system and streamlining the management of some patients presenting with chest pain.
Information gathered in the "6 Hours - It Matters!" project shows that in common with the rest of the country the largest percentages of patients who turn up at the emergency department are not in the most urgent triage categories, but in the next two levels down.
Fewer patients are admitted to wards from the emergency department in Dunedin compared with the average rates in small, medium and large boards.
In Dunedin, the percentage of patients admitted was 27%, whereas in other areas the rate ranged from about 33% to 40% on average.
The attendance rate per head of population at Dunedin was not extraordinary at 19.8%. In large district health boards the average rate was 17.4%, 24.9% for medium sized boards and 34.9% for small ones.
