By Susie Nordqvist
It's another Saturday night and as the parties and the bars across New Zealand warm up, so are the hospital accident and emergency departments that will be run off their feet later on.
But North Shore's A&E reckons it has found a way to save lives and slash waiting times. The secret is something called "point-of-care testing" – where medical tests are carried out at patients' bedsides rather than elsewhere in the hospital.
“North Shore Hospital before we moved into the new facilities was doing very poorly in terms of the six-hour target,” says Dr Willem Landman.
In fact, in 2009 the waiting times in their emergency department were the worst in the country.
Just 61 percent of patients were discharged or transferred within six hours. That figure is now 97 percent, and that's partly because of point-of-care testing.
“We do x-rays and immediately on the screen at the bedside we have a digital picture of that x-ray,” says Dr Landman. “Or we can do an ultrasound at the bedside and answer critical decisions that we need to know right away.”
University of Auckland Professor Tava Olsen used point-of-care testing to study the waiting times of 55,000 patients in California, but the results can be applied to New Zealand too.
“We found that the average wait across all patients decreased from six-and-a-half hours down to five hours,” says Professor Olsen. “The revisit rates went from 2.3 percent of patients who would return with the same complaint to the same ED down to 1.7 percent.”
And it saves lives.
“There was an Australian study that showed a 30 percent increase in mortality among patients that were admitted to emergency departments in busy periods,” says Professor Olsen.
But the equipment doesn't come cheap and that's a barrier for some of our smaller hospitals who don't have it, even if in the long-term the benefits far outweigh the up-front costs.
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