Only 40% of older Tasmanians needing a hospital bed left the emergency department within eight hours in 2023-24, the lowest rate in Australia, a report from emergency doctors has found.
The Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, which released the report today, recommends 90% of admitted patients leave the emergency department within eight hours.
For younger Tasmanian patients the figure was 61%, while the national rate for older patients was 54%.
Presentations by older people at the state’s four public emergency departments rose by 19% between 2018-19 and 2023-24, compared with 2% for younger people, the report found.
It also found more than half of older patients arrived by ambulance and more than half were admitted to hospital.
College president Peter Allely said the health system was “simply not set up to cope” with Australia’s ageing population.
Labor MLC Sarah Lovell said Tasmania was producing some of the worst results in the country, particularly for older patients.
“This is really a symptom of a system that is at breaking point,” she said.
Lovell said the government should abandon its plan to take $700 million from the health budget.
“The longer people wait to be admitted to hospital, the worse their conditions get,” she said.
Greens MP Cecily Rosol said the government was cutting $700 million from the health department while “putting money into a stadium”.
“What is shocking about this is the government’s lack of care,” she said.
“Tasmanians are not only waiting for healthcare, they’re waiting for a government who cares.”
Premier Jeremy Rockliff said the health system was “always under pressure because there’s increasing demand”.
He said patients were not moving through hospitals because there were not enough aged care places for older people to go to.
“To relieve that pressure, we need the federal government to step in and of course have more aged care placements,” he said.
Asked about comments from the federal health minister that it was up to state and territory governments to address pressures on the aged care system, Rockliff said primary healthcare and aged care were both federal responsibilities.
He said the minister needed to “stop blaming states for federal government responsibilities”.
Rosol said the state government was “very good at pointing the finger everywhere else so that the attention is taken off them”.
She said the government had been given recommendations to improve the flow of patients through hospitals over many years.
