Getting teams throughout Dunedin Hospital to work together is the key to shortening stays in the emergency department and is not rocket science, Medical Officer of Health (Southland) David Tulloch says.
At yesterday's Southern District Health Board hospitals' advisory committee meeting in Dunedin he said staff needed to recognise the six-hour emergency stay target was about improving "the patient journey" and all needed to contribute to that.
He conceded it could be difficult getting teams to "join in".
Southland Hospital has been much closer to meeting the requirement that 95% of patients stay no longer than six hours in the emergency department. Its recent results have been a few percent away from the target. In Dunedin, only about three-quarters of patients' stays meet the target time.
Mr Tulloch said it had been found in Southland that about 25% of the breaches of the six-hour limit were only slightly over the time.
Mr Tulloch said he was not sure that was the case in Dunedin.
Acting chief executive Lexie O'Shea said in some of the Southland instances "if everyone had done something a little better" the target could have been met.
The committee had a brief presentation about the $2.4 million business intelligence information technology project showing how it could be used to let staff throughout the hospital know how well patients were progressing through the ED.
Acting chief operating officer (Otago) Megan Boivin said the system used a traffic light warning. When a patient's stay was coming up to five hours there was an amber warning, and at five hours a red alert.
The information could be "drilled right down to patient level" if needed to see where improvements could be made.
At this stage the project is concentrating on three of the national targets - shorter stays in the ED, improved access to elective surgery and help for hospital patients to quit smoking.
Mrs O'Shea said one of the advantages of the system was it allowed staff to produce reports analysing the situation "really quickly".
