Victoria Doctors Welcome $1.5 Billion Emergency Department Plan but Call for Wider Reform

Doctors in Victoria have welcomed a $1.5 billion commitment to expand emergency departments across the state, while warning that fixing emergency care alone will not resolve the wider hospital crisis.

According to the Australian Medical Association's Victorian branch and the Australian Salaried Medical Officers' Federation Victoria, the plan would expand capacity across 12 Victorian emergency departments, adding 250 beds and 1,500 health workers, with the stated aim of reducing emergency department waiting times by up to 20 per cent.

According to the policy listing, the 12 departments are at the Alfred, Austin, Ballarat Base, Bendigo, Footscray, Latrobe Regional, Royal Children's, Shepparton, Swan Hill, Werribee Mercy, Wonthaggi and University Hospital Geelong hospitals, and the 1,500 workers include 750 nurses.

AMA Victoria President Dr. Simon Judkins said investment in emergency care was urgently needed, with patients and hospital staff already experiencing unacceptable pressure. "We welcome this significant commitment to increasing emergency department capacity and reducing the unacceptable delays many Victorian patients are currently experiencing," he said.

But according to Dr. Judkins, emergency departments do not operate in isolation, and the doctors working in them are already dealing with heavy workloads. The associations are calling on the next Victorian Government to review the entire emergency healthcare pipeline, including how quickly ambulances can transfer patients into hospital, how fast emergency departments can move patients into hospital beds, whether intensive care has sufficient capacity, and whether patients who have finished acute care can move safely into rehabilitation, aged care or community support.

The associations also want clear details about the provision of doctors under the plan, not just beds and overall staffing numbers. Their argument is that additional beds only help if the whole chain around them — from ambulance arrival to discharge — can keep pace.

What happens next is a matter for the election campaign and the incoming government: the commitment must be funded, staffed and delivered department by department, and the doctors' groups say they will judge it on whether waiting times actually fall and whether bottlenecks elsewhere in the system are addressed at the same time.

Image credit: Emergency department in the Wagga Wagga Rural Referral Hospital by bidgee, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 AU).