Staff and services on the second floor of Dunedin Hospital’s clinical services building are slowly being moved elsewhere to make way for a new medical assessment unit.
The unit, now on the building’s seventh floor, is being moved so as to be closer to the emergency department and hopefully ease pressure on that part of the hospital.
Dunedin Hospital’s emergency department, like most in New Zealand, often fails to meet Ministry of Health targets for how long patients should wait to be seen and either admitted or discharged.
The assessment unit, staffed by general medical staff, is intended to handle non-urgent cases arriving at emergency, meaning staff there, in theory, are freed up to be available for people who urgently need emergency services.
Project manager Kathy Orr told a Southern District Health Board committee meeting that the departments were working together to try to ensure the unit ‘‘pulled’’ patients from emergency who were best handled by it, rather than emergency having to ‘‘push’’ patients to the unit.
Clinicians were also hoping to accelerate the decision-making on future treatment plans for patients by senior medical officers and speed up the patient discharge system.
‘‘Dedicated nursing leadership will continue to drive improvements in the current processes,’’ Ms Orr said.
‘‘Also, if a longer or shorter stay is required we are hoping there will be an immediate decision about whether a patient is discharged or admitted and they won’t have to wait for hours.’’
Some construction work in the clinical services building had already been done and work was soon to begin in the Fraser Building, across the street, where services located where the unit is about to shift to will move.
The relocated unit is expected to be open by the end of next year.
‘‘The impact of the Alert Level 4 lockdown is still a concern because we do no yet know all of the shortages that can come through the construction process,’’ Ms Orr said.
‘‘As we identify those we are working to resolve them as soon as possible and keep ourselves on track.’’
