Ambulance drivers win fight over emergencies
By Gail Lord
SYDNEY — Last week New South Wales ambulance officers were in dispute over the failure of hospitals in Sydney's West to take emergency patients. Drivers here had have been moving from hospital to hospital trying to find an open emergency ward prepared to take patients.
On numerous occasions emergency departments had been closed to ambulances but not to the public. For example, at the Nepean Hospital 75.2 hours of closures occurred in April over 19 occasions and 121 hours in May over 29 occasions. As well the times of closure varied unpredictably from day to day.
Shopping for around for admissions stops ambulance officers from responding to calls. Such is the strain of the job that there are 80 positions vacant for ambulance officers.
This dispute was settled when the NSW Health Department issued a directive to hospitals reaffirming emergency guidelines and admitting to some lapses in their implementation. These state that:
- All emergency departments must always be available to accept life-threatening emergencies.
- If an ambulance delivers a patient to an emergency department the patient must be accepted irrespective of his or her status.
- A decision to restrict access to an emergency department by diversion of other than life-threatening cases must only be made in genuinely exceptional cases. In such situations there must be prior warning to the ambulance services and an evaluation of which surrounding hospitals have the capacity to accept diverted cases.
Peter Clapham, Assistant Secretary of the Health and Research Employees Association, welcomed the resolution of the dispute, stressing that the Health Department directive only reiterates the policy of many years.