THE NSW Bureau of Health Information publishes what it describes as independent reports about the performance of the NSW healthcare system.
Its website contains a wealth of data, including a range of quarterly reports and a search mechanism that allows the user to look - for example - at their local hospital, and how it fares against other facilities across a range of standardised measures.
Importantly, the search facility also captures trend data, which shows whether a situation is stable, improving or worsening.
Unfortunately, for the new Maitland Hospital at Metford, the data is all more or less pointing the one way, and they're not the sorts of results that anyone wants to see.
There is no doubt that the strains of COVID - both in outright workload and the loss of staff to the disease and its necessary isolation protocols - have put a huge burden on the system.
But the Maitland results stand out from other facilities, and add a firm skeleton of fact to a welter of complaints from patients and staff alike about a range of inadequacies, some of which were predicted before construction began.
As our health reporter, Anita Beaumont, noted this week, the latest bureau bulletin, for July 1 to September 30, shows that only 45 per cent of Maitland Hospital's emergency patients received their treatment within the clinically recommended time-frame.
This 45 per cent figure is down 15.3 percentage points - or 25.4 per cent - on the 60.3 per cent achieved during the same period in 2021, which was at the old hospital.
Equally importantly, that 45 per cent figure put Maitland at the bottom of a table of 15 hospitals in the Hunter New England Local Health District.
Four smaller hospitals had on-time figures above 80 per cent, with Calvary Mater, at 76.8 per cent, the fastest of the big facilities.
John Hunter, in 12th spot with 60.8 per cent of emergency patients treated on-time, was down 7.7 percentage points, or 11.2 per cent, on its 3rd quarter 2021 result of 68.5 per cent.
With NSW health officials predicting another spike in COVID cases, our hospitals will be under further strain over Christmas.
Globally, case numbers began to rise again in early November, but the expected corresponding rise in COVID-related deaths is yet to emerge.
This is good news, but as always with COVID, the best protection is to avoid contracting it in the first place.
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