While trawling around looking for some information on trauma surgery, came accross this neat and convenient summary of our public hospital system’s performance against several key performance indicators for the 1st 6 months of 2009. 

Makes interesting reading, particularly the ongoing ‘battle’ with accident and emergency services.  

I particularly noted the pretty awful results concerning times to see accident and emergency patients assessed with triage ratings 2 onwards (72%, 62%, 72% of patients in such categories being seen within the recommended timeframe).  

The report doesn’t say what the average time for seeing such patients was, but presumably there are some such patients not seen for well and truly more than the recommended review timeframes.

No doubt some of such patients suffered prejudice to their positions due to such delay in being seen, investigated and treated.  Given the scale of demand for accident and emergency services it seems likely to remain a fertile ground for medical negligence claims, while this performance remains well behind the Australian College’s recommendations.

A continuing battle for our public health system.