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Equipment shortfall highlighted: Bendigo patients put at risk
AMA Victoria President Dr Mark Yates said failure of outdated hospital equipment was putting Victorian patients at risk and urgent funding was needed to replace the backlog of outdated equipment still in use in Victoria.
A recent situation at Bendigo, Dr Yates said was a perfect example of how outdated equipment was putting patients at risk.
Dr Yates said the CT scanner, a critical diagnostic tool, broke down on a number of occasions last month and on one occasion was out of action for two weeks, requiring patients to be transferred to the Bendigo Private Hospital by ambulance or by trolley to the nearby Peter MacCallum (a separate building on the same grounds as the hospital).
However, Dr Yates said patients in a critical condition were unable to be transferred, forcing doctors to treat patients without all the information required.
“It is a credit to the doctors at Bendigo that they managed the situations without serious adverse impacts on patients.
“Doctors at Bendigo hospital are extremely concerned about the impact of this poor equipment on patients,” Dr Yates said.
An AMA Victoria survey carried out earlier this year found access to quality equipment to be a key issue for Victoria’s public hospital doctors.
“The amount of funding from the Department of Human Services for equipment has decreased in recent years, with hospitals relying more on Special Purpose Funds, bequests and fundraising to fund new equipment.
“Systematic funding needs to be allocated for the purchase of hospital equipment to ensure the backlog of inefficient and old equipment can be replaced in a timely manner.”
In one case at Bendigo, a man in his 70s with severe abdominal pain was unable to be transferred for a CT scan to see if he needed surgery due to his critical condition. Doctors were forced to treat him by other means and hope his condition did not deteriorate.
“The man was critical for the first 48 hours. The situation was nerve racking for everyone involved and unnecessary if the scanner had been working.
“A CT scan would have given doctors a clear indication of the problem, and given the patient and his family piece of mind the appropriate treatment was being followed.
“The current scanner at Bendigo is seven years old, outdated and obviously in need of urgent replacement.
“Bendigo is a major regional hospital. It is ridiculous a vital piece of equipment such as a CT scanner has been allowed to deteriorate to this level without appropriate funding being allocated for its replacement,” Dr Yates said.
“The hospital is a regional trauma centre taking seriously ill and out of hours emergency patients from around the region. Yet the CT Scanner, needed for rapid assessment of emergency patients, would be one of the slowest in the state
“At Bendigo the current single slice CT scanner can take 30 to 45 minutes to do a full scan, in comparison to two or three minutes for the new CT scanners currently on the market.
“In an emergency doctors need prompt information.”
Dr Yates said comments from doctors in the survey showed that vital equipment used in day to day patient care was in poor condition in both major metropolitan and regional hospitals.
The AMA Victoria survey of more than 1000 Victorian public hospital doctors found 44 per cent of doctors believed risk with relation to access to and quality of equipment was not adequately managed by hospitals, while only 29 per cent agreed risk was adequately managed and only 1 per cent strongly agreed.
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