Find out if YOUR local hospital made the list of Australia's most underperforming public hospitals

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has released a damning new report which reveals which of the nation’s public hospitals are underperforming — and it’s a pretty shocking read.

The medical group found that out of 201 state-funded hospitals included in their analysis, a mere three were found to be delivering care to patients within the recommended time.


The AMA’s new Australian Public Hospitals in Logjam 2023 analysis which covered 2021-2022 'paints a worsening picture of emergency department and essential surgery performance’, according to AMA President Steve Robson.

The result is a stark decrease from the year prior. In 2020-21, 15 of 201 hospitals received 'green lights' against the same standards, demonstrating that a vast amount of public hospitals are failing to deliver standard care to patients in time.

The three hospitals meeting expectations are NSW’s Young Hospital and SA’s South Coast District and Riverland General hospitals.


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The number of hospitals AMA assessed to be delivering timely medical care dropped from 15 to 3 in a year, according to their latest report. Image Credit: Pexels/Pixabay


The AMA found that based on data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, these hospitals were able to deliver on-time care to their patients in terms of emergency department response and elective surgeries.

‘It’s devastating for every person waiting and dealing with months and months of pain,’ Robson said.

‘It’s unlikely hospitals will be able to expand their capacity to address this backlog if there is no intervention.’


The public health system, still reeling from the ravages of a global pandemic, is under mounting pressure from continued workforce shortages, increased ambulance ramping, and emergency departments beyond capacity.

Given the dismal results, the AMA is calling on the government to take steps to address the estimated hundreds of thousands of surgeries said to be in Australia’s backlog.

‘When National Cabinet sits down on (February 3), we want ministers to tackle the backlog of surgeries that we estimate will top half a million at the end of June,’ Robson said.

‘We are calling for a new national plan funded by all governments but with an up-front advance payment provided by the Commonwealth to support state and territory governments to expand their hospital capacity, including the workforce, to address the elective surgery backlog.’


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The AMA wants the government to enact changes that would address the thousands of pending elective surgeries across Australia. Image Credit: Pexels/Jonathan Borba


This includes removing the yearly 6.5 per cent ceiling placed on federal funding increases.

The AMA is also calling on the public to take a proactive stance and check how their local hospital fared in their Hospital Logjam Finder tool.

‘The AMA’s logjam finder is the only place national hospital data is presented in this way and we’re asking people to tell us their stories and email their MPs so state and federal governments can hear their voices,’ he said.

Aussies may share their public hospital experiences with the AMA here.


Key Takeaways

  • Only 3 of 201 public hospitals in Australia are delivering care to patients within recommended time frames according to an AMA report.
  • Their Australian Public Hospitals in Logjam report paints a severe picture for the country's health system says AMA President Steve Robson.
  • The AMA is calling on National Cabinet this week to tackle the country’s backlog of surgeries, with a new national plan funded by all governments.
  • The public is also encouraged to use the AMA's Hospital Logjam tool to see how their local hospitals are faring.
On the note of reforms, there also have been previous calls for change in Medicare citing how its funding model potentially marginalises many Australians from accessing quality health care.

In fact, a report released in December of last year said the government health program was ineffective and ‘in the grip of a mid-life crisis’ and suggested several changes. These include making it easier for GPs to work with other allied health professionals and deploying an additional 1000 clinicians across Australia to augment public health service.

As part of systemic problems plaguing Medicare, it was previously pointed out that more and more GPs are moving away from bulk-billing out of concerns for the sustainability of their practices.


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There have also been long standing calls for the government to reform Medicare over fears its structure inevitably leads to more Australians losing access to health care. Image Credit: Pexels/Karolina Graboswka


It was also reported in October that billions of dollars were lost to Medicare fraud due to false claims, which led to fears of further understaffing in the medical sector due to doctors’ mass resignations.

Hopefully, changes are made for all Australians to enjoy the quality healthcare they deserve.

How about you, have you had a good or bad experience in your local hospital? Share your story in the comments below!


Source: YouTube/7NEWS Australia
 
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All nursing & medical & allied health professional staff need appropriate academic & clinical training & need to be examined appropriately to ensure that they are safe to practice without supervision.
Being short staffed due to too much workload & not enough staff to cover due to poor planning or sickness is a constant in most hospital wards & specialised areas. This means that patient safety is then an issue.
Too many patients fall out of bed. My darling Dad ~ RIP fell out of bed in his nursing home so many times and on his 23rd fall they put an alarm mattress on the floor that I had requested since Day One. I had also requested that he have a bed that could lower to the floor or just put his mattress on the floor. The response that I kept getting was negative from the Nurse Manager. Finally when he broke his hip on his 23rd fall out of bed & needed surgery they got an appropriate bed & alarm floor mat.

When in a public hospital the evening nurse in charge was not very clinically astute & even though his obvious symptoms were cleary pointed out to her in the evening around 7pm & I requested that a Dr be called to examine him, her reply was that there was no Dr available to call & that a Dr would see him in the morning. He then suffered a heart attack at 10:00am before the Dr came to see him! This could have been prevented with approproate nursing & medical management.
He was then moved to a cardiac unit in another big public hospital where he was put in an observation unit. He was the only patient there & hefell out of bed & broke his arm! Tbe nurse tripped over him on the floor when she went in to check why his heart monitor was off. He then fell out of bed in the cardiac ward four times. Other patients in the same ward were also falling out of bed. I could hardly believe it! So this is due to overmedicating the patients and lack of adequate supervision by experienced staff. We had to get a nurse from the nursing agency to monitor him 24hrs as we could not rely on the ward staff when he was in that ward. The only trust worthy person I met caring for him was the Medical gerontology Professor

When in yet another hospital, private this time, I found him laying in a cold wet bed & he was complaining of feeling cold. His sheets were saturated with urine. There were no staff to be seen anywhere & I had to search cupboards to find linen to change his bed. I eventually found the linen cupboard and then a nurse appeared told me that his nurse will change his bed and that took another 15mins to wait for. The medical director in this hospital was very rude and had no empathy and just wrote my Dad off as being old. I could not believe his callous attitude.

My sister had an operation on her stomach as her muscles had split apart due to carrying children. The staff treated her abhorrently, not giving her pain relief when she needed it & telling her she must be a drug addict! This same nurse did not assist her to go to the toilet & she collapsed on the floor due to the overwhelming pain she was experiencing. Obviously her young nurse was inexperienced & very opinionated & judgmental. Just not good enough!
It is absolutely disgusting how our elderly are being treated just because they are deemed to be 'too old'. Hello?? they are still people who require loving care and attention no matter what their age.

In the Aged Care Facility I worked at, when a resident was deemed to be a falls risk, the bed was kept low low and a crash mat was put along side of it, which was attached to a buzzer should the poor soul fall out of bed. Saturated/soiled sheets were changed immediately whether it was during the day or at night.
Call bells were a priority and were attended to as a matter of importance. Looking after 55 residents with only 2 PCA's on night shift plus the RN, was hard work.

I have a lot of empathy and compassion for the elderly without our community and have always strived to provide the very best care possible. I am 67 this year and am not thinking of retiring any time soon ......

We can 'thank' (and I use this term very very loosely) for the compassion (not) shown by the Victorian Minister for Health at the time, Dan Andrews. He has single handedly stuffed up our hospital system and continues doing what he likes, now that he is the Premier of Victoria, thanks largely to the sheep of this state who re elected him.
 
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They do not install safety rails because a new law states they are abuse rails. Restraining patients is not on apparently!!
When my elderly mother was in hospital, they told me that if she was needing it, the Specialist would assess her and prescribe bedrails. She didn't need it though.
 
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When my elderly mother was in hospital, they told me that if she was needing it, the Specialist would assess her and prescribe bedrails. She didn't need it though.
Bed rails are looked upon as a form of restraint as is medication. Different states, different rulings perhaps?
 
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Learning on-the-job does not entail learning 1870s-style ursing. What I have seen of the university training of Australian nurses does not impress me as rocket science; and the human body has not changed in the last 300 000 years. By all means give the RN a degree-level qualification when exams have been passed etc, but....the more practice in the field, usually the better the practitioner.
You're allowed to have your opinion on nurses and view them as not equal to bygone days. I personally wouldn't want to be a hospital nurse, but I regard them highly.
A lot of people would agree with you though, especially having to attend Uni. It's not cheap!
 
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At one time nurses were trained on-the-job in hospital, not in university. They were supervised by "Sister Tutors" and a "Matron", not academics. They lived together in "nurses' homes" and thus could learn to work together as a group. However, that was in the bad old days when they learnt on-the-job and ultimately knew their job well. And that practice ensured an adequate supply of junior nurses to help their seniors do their jobs properly.
Those bad old days to which you refer were when this country"s health service was the envy of the world. So why such a terrible decline in those years since. Poor Government planning, once upon a time government used actuaries to develop ten year plans into the future, this seems to have stopped, we now have a reactive system not a planned one. Hospital administration when the Matron ruled the roost was almost military not the haphazzard system of today and all those other very valid points raised by others everyone in the system has contributed to it decline lets get it back to where it was once before the envy of the world?
 
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They do not install safety rails because a new law states they are abuse rails. Restraining patients is not on apparently!!
How dumb is that! I would have been lost without the rails when I've been in for hip surgery - not so much for keeping me in bed, but they made it much easier to get comfortable.
 
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One hears horror stories like those above, but I have to say my experiences have been quite different. We decided years ago that we could no longer afford health insurance and have relied on the public hospital system ever since. We haven’t been able to fault the treatment, professionalism and care that the medical and nursing staff have exhibited any time we have needed to attend hospital, as out-patients or in-patients, and wait times for surgery have always been within acceptable levels, ie three months is the longest I had to wait. I don’t negate the difficulties some people have experienced, but I would just like to present a more positive patient experience.
 
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You're allowed to have your opinion on nurses and view them as not equal to bygone days. I personally wouldn't want to be a hospital nurse, but I regard them highly.
A lot of people would agree with you though, especially having to attend Uni. It's not cheap!
I did not say that modern nursing as not equal to bygone days. I simply indicated that on the job training allied to course work could be better than the current university-focused training. I would hope that modern nursing is an improvement on that in the 1870s, although some of the stories in this thread suggests that it has gone down hill since then.
 
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I have to say my treatment at my local hospital in Perth has been very good. I went to the emergency dept in the early hours of the morning in terrible pain and was taken straight through. I had scans etc and i had a large gallstone stuck in the duct and it had become infected. Surgeon came and saw me and operated an hour later. My only issue with the hospital was with a couple of foreign nurses who didnt seem to be trained properly.
 
I am an older EEN and I believe that nursing should be hospital base training with online study. Working collaboratively with the team is best communication and definitely great for the client. As you progress in years of on the floor you continue studies which enhanced studies in your area of expertise. The importance of the doctor/nurse relationship leads to great outcomes. There are just too many levels and consequently this leads to the ego of the human taking over and not focusing on the patient.
Even in the community nursing arena you find these 3rd parties of looking after HCP is just a business and guess who suffers, the client.
Oh well when greed disappears maybe there will be more success.
On the subject of medicare it should be a priority for all and that no potential patient is left behind.
Yes I know in a perfect world.....
 
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