Shocking images a familiar story in a hospital system in crisis

Many have been shocked by images that have emerged from a major Victorian hospital. Two vulnerable people – a young cancer patient and a nursing home resident – reportedly waited for hours in a corridor and a large tent set up outside the emergency department.

These stories will come as no surprise to frontline health workers, who have been warning for months that conditions in Victoria’s hospitals, already at crisis point, have been worsening.

Makeshift structures are being used to cater for overcrowding at Box Hill Hospital.Credit:Scott McNaughton

They say that things that never happened before or happened quite rarely – such as a patient waiting in an emergency department for more than a day – are becoming almost commonplace. They’ve told us that people who have had strokes or a heart attack, who once would have been seen urgently, are now among those routinely having to wait for care.

On Wednesday, journalist Louise Milligan tweeted an account of a teenager who she said had just finished chemotherapy, who had waited 27 hours in a corridor of the Box Hill Hospital, alongside heartbreaking photos of his makeshift bed.

The next morning, the daughter of a woman in her 80s who had a suspected stroke, called 3AW radio saying her mother had spent more than 16 hours in a large tent outside the same hospital.

Unfortunately, data shows these cases are just the tip of a large iceberg. In the three months to June this year, there were 432 patients that languished in the emergency department for more than a day at Box Hill Hospital. In the months before, there had just been a handful.

For some time, those workers managing our hospital and ambulance systems in Victoria have been trying to do their best in a bad situation. It might not meet community expectations, but presumably the alternative to an 83-year-old patient in a bed in a marquee would be that she’d be left in a crowded corridor, even less well-equipped for her needs.

Still, emergency doctors’ and nurses’ groups share the view that temporary facilities in EDs may only entrench and worsen overcrowding, by pulling scarce nursing resources from the wards. They have again called for solutions to focus on the cause of the problem, which includes a lack of access to care outside hospitals and problems discharging people from the wards.

“The system is sick,” said Australian College of Nursing chief executive Adjunct Professor Kylie Ward.

“This is an indictment that our system is overloaded, that it is not meeting the needs of the people, and that we need to invest in primary care and in aged care to adequately discharge from the hospitals so that we don’t bottleneck coming through the front door.”

While some Victorians feel the pandemic is over, the reality is that there are still enough patients with the virus sick enough to fill a hospital. The number of severely ill patients has increased. Staff are still off sick. Many workers are now beyond burnout, with no real light at the end of the tunnel.

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