Access to Victorian hospital emergency departments has become steadily worse since 2013, an Auditor-General's report has found. or signup to continue reading The analysis revealed the state's hospitals only met one of their five key targets across the decade, and failed on the other four every single year. One of the metrics - the number of people staying longer than 24 hours in ED - rose more than 2000 per cent over the decade to 11,363 patients.
The government target was zero. This problem was twice as bad in regional health services, with Ballarat Base Hospital the worst offender, but wait times were also poor in Bendigo, Geelong, Warrnambool and Mildura. The report included case studies looking at the specific challenges for Ambulance Victoria, Royal Melbourne Hospital, Werribee Mercy Hospital, and Bendigo Health.
It analysed eight measures the government had taken to fix the problems, but found no "significant improvement". The Auditor-General made three recommendations to improve the system, including investigating what's causing the problems and publishing better public data on ED wait times. The state government has accepted two recommendations in full and one "in principle" and said it had already started work to meet them.
A government spokesperson blamed COVID-19 for the failures. "Health systems across the world have been heavily impacted and changed as a consequence of the one-in-100-year pandemic," the spokesperson said. The Victorian government published five ".
