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Care Opinion

Unacceptable wait times

Posted By avocetdb65

"Unacceptable wait times"

About: Wonthaggi Hospital

(as the patient),

I had to wait for 4 hours in extreme pain with no medication or place to lie down at Wonthaggi hospital in the early hours of the morning. I eventually had to catch a taxi home (without being seen) because I was too unwell to drive, after hearing people ahead of me had been waiting 7.5 hours and still hadn’t been seen.

I was suffering from an extreme migraine and my blood pressure was just under crisis level.

Numerous people were complaining about having to wait in pain for many hours (between 5 - 7.5 hours) and many left as I did.

This is not good enough and will lead to unnecessary deaths.

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Responses

Response from Jan Child, CEO, Bass Coast Health 6 years ago
Jan Child
CEO,
Bass Coast Health

Submitted on 2/01/2018 at 6:30 PM
Published on Care Opinion on 3/01/2018 at 9:48 AM

picture of Jan Child

Dear avocetdb65,

I would like to sincerely thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback - I would be very keen to chat with you on the phone if you were agreeable, to get some details about your experience so that I can directly review your file and speak to the staff rostered on that shift.

I should say that it is a very busy time for our Emergency Department - the number of patients we see every day more than doubles; and whilst we attempt to get to everyone as quickly as possible by increasing our staff, sometimes we literally run out of treatment spaces because our Emergency Department is quite small.

I should say that it is always the case that people who have more critical care needs will 'jump the queue' so that we can provide urgent care and resuscitation measures. This often results in some people waiting longer.

There is no excuse though for people to be in pain whilst they are waiting, and we have processes in place to offer pain relief where required - it would be very useful for me to chat to you so that I can understand why that didn't occur in your case. My mobile number is 0472846355. I hope that I hear from you so that I can properly investigate and feed back to you.

Sincerely,

Jan Child

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