Improved efficiency at hospital

STAFF at Bendigo Health are making changes they hope will help free up hospital beds and expand at-home care services.

The effort is a result of a 25 per cent increase in ED presentations and a 10 per cent rise in hospital admissions during the last five years.

CEO Peter Faulkner said while resources were stretched at times during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, that isn’t the case anymore.

“Our resources are pretty good,” said he said.

“There’s no doubt that COVID has seen some deferral of care, and that’s resulted in people becoming more ill when they’re at home, and then when they are presenting, needing more intervention.”

Mr Faulkner said Bendigo’s ageing demographic is one of many factors likely to have caused the increase in patient numbers.

“Today we’ve got every bed that we can have open, open,” said Mr Faulkner. “We have an ageing population, and while we’re living longer, we’re not necessarily living healthier.

“Bendigo has experienced population growth, and that brings with it increased demand.”

Acting director of nursing and medical services Penny Spencer said Bendigo Health staff are trying to improve patient flow within the hospital.

“We’ve increased our scope of service, so we’re putting more resources in to take on more patients in community-based care,” said Ms Spencer.

“We’ve increased the service to include rehab in the home, and we’ve increased the amount of patients that can be seen at home.

“We’re getting between 25-35 admissions every day, so for us to utilise our hospital beds well, we have to have at least 35 discharges each day.

“We try and focus on how we can influence the back door, because we can’t influence how many people are coming into ED, but we can try and improve the patient discharging.”