Authorities are investigating the death of a man who waited more than three hours for a bed at a regional hospital in Victoria, with the premier, Daniel Andrews, blaming staff shortages for causing “massive strain” on the state’s health system.
The 72-year-old man went into cardiac arrest and died on Monday afternoon after waiting in an ambulance outside the Bairnsdale Regional Health Service in east Gippsland for about three-and-a-half hours.
In a statement, Bairnsdale Regional Health Service said the man was assessed by hospital staff when he arrived at the hospital at about midday having suffered a fall.
He was brought into the emergency department at 3.30pm, where he experienced cardiac arrest in the emergency department bathrooms. Staff attempted to resuscitate him but he died at 4.15pm.
“We express our deepest sympathy to family and friends,” a spokesperson for the hospital said. “At the time of the man’s arrival via ambulance, there were three other ambulances waiting.
“All nine emergency department cubicles were occupied at the time, in addition to our short stay unit cubicles.”
The spokesperson said 12 doctors and nurses had called in sick on Monday, representing about 18% of direct clinical staff rostered on that day. Six of them had Covid-19.
“In addition to staff furloughing because they have tested positive, we are seeing an increasing number of staff absences that we believe are also Covid-19 related, including having children or family members test positive, and the exhaustion, fatigue and stress of working through this pandemic for more than two years now,” the spokesperson said.
The hospital managed to cover 10 of the 12 absent workers, but it meant five beds in other parts of the hospital had to be closed, leading to a “patient flow blockage” that made it harder for emergency department patients to be transferred.
The hospital said it continues to see increasing numbers of people present to the emergency department.
It blamed an ongoing shortage of medical workers in regional Victoria, an increase in people with complex illness as they delayed or abandoned their medical care during the pandemic and an influx in the population of mainly older people with pre-exisiting medical conditions.
Bairnsdale Regional Health Service and Ambulance Victoria will investigate the death.
Andrews offered his sympathies to the man’s family and said there would be a proper review into the “tragic” death.
“On any given day over these last few months, we’ve had over 2,000 staff who have not been able to report to work each and every day, across our hospital system. If you start counting at broader services, then that number grows,” Andrews said.
He said the government had invested heavily in more paramedics, doctors and nurses but conceded there was “more to do”.
“The big issue here is backup workforces, we’re using our third or fourth backup workforce, where people are coming back from retirement, people are doing full-time instead of part-time, people are helping out in every way they possibly can,” he said.
“You can’t generate health professionals in a matter of weeks and months.”
President of the Rural Doctors Association of Victoria, Rob Phair, who works at Bairnsdale hospital, said Covid had contributed to systemic issues in the health system.
“We all have this heart-sinking moment when we hear about these situations,” he said. “We’ve all been in situations where we just know that we’ve been completely under the pump and we haven’t been able to provide the best standard of care to everyone.
“Patients end up having to wait for multiple hours and we just can’t even can’t lay eyes on them, we can’t even talk to them because we are just so under the pump.”
Phair said deferred care was a huge problem in regional and remote areas, given the limited amount of GPs, their availability and the cost for patients.
“You have patients who haven’t had their blood pressure adequately controlled, who haven’t had access to mental health care and they get disheartened and dispirited, they know it takes three or four weeks to get into a GP, so they probably don’t bother,” he said.
The Victorian Ambulance Union secretary, Danny Hill, said most paramedics were treating patients who had deferred care.
“They’re waiting until they’re critically unwell and then dialling triple zero,” he said.
“It puts much more strain on the system. People who see their doctor regularly probably don’t need an ambulance.”
Hill said ramping – where ambulances are outside hospitals for long periods of time with patients on board – is occurring “every single shift”.
“There is no location where there isn’t ramping happening at some point over the last couple of months,” he said, urging people to only call triple zero in emergencies.
Phair said there needs to be long-term measures in place to encourage more doctors and nurses to work in rural and remote healthcare.
Bairnsdale is in the electorate of Nationals MP Tim Bull, who said workers at the hospital were overwhelmed.
“I know many people who work at the hospital, I know the sort of hours they’ve been working, the stress they’re dealing with and the strict framework of rules they’ve diligently navigated for more than two years – they’re our local heroes,” he said.
“But they can only do so much when the rural health workforce is so underprepared and under resourced by state Labor – even before the massive strain and uncertainty of the pandemic.”
