Amid the latest situation, he said: “Bed capacity, particularly off the back of a busy weekend, can mean some patients remain in an ED bed to be closely monitored until ward beds become available.”
Bed flow was expected to improve through planned discharges, but he said: “The hospital remains very busy, and people with non-emergency conditions are likely to experience a long wait to be seen in ED, as those with the greatest need and life-threatening conditions are seen first.”
He said that like other emergency departments around the country, Hawke’s Bay Hospital had continued to experience regularly high volumes of patients with increasingly complex conditions and acuity during the past 12 months.
Pressure on services continued to be “exacerbated by staff absences across many services for a range of reasons such as general illness, Covid-19, and the need to isolate or care for dependents who may need to isolate”.
Wards B2 and A1 at Hawke’s Bay Hospital are dedicated Covid-19 wards with restricted access, but Covid hospitalisation numbers have been dropping in recent weeks, and just 11 patients were in the facilities on Tuesday.
Whyman said staff absence rates continuously change as people recover, finish isolating and return to work, but “workforce shortages” are another challenge “which [is] not isolated to our district”.
Pressures on the frontline at hospitals nationally and regionally were being addressed by focusing on hospital flow, prioritising urgent care, and recruiting through targeted national and international recruitment campaigns, he said.
“We are indebted to the hard work of our healthcare kaimahi [workers] who continue to provide the highest level of care to their communities.”
Staff union representative and New Zealand Nurses Organisation kaiwhakahaere [president] Kerri Nuku said the issues were not unique in Hawke’s Bay.
“This has been an issue pre-Covid,” she said. “In the past, if the hospital is at capacity, patients bottleneck in ED. This goes back to early 2012.”
“We believe that the complexity of patients has contributed to the increased length of stay in hospitals, therefore taking up hospital beds,” she said.
Surgical services were operating to meet deadlines, meaning emergency departments are used to assist with patient pre-operative assessments, mostly on the weekends.
She said mental health patients were slow to be assessed and placed in appropriate areas due to a shortage of mental health staff, who were spreading themselves between community callouts and police requesting support.
“Post-Covid it’s worse,” she said. “However, Covid patients are fast to move on from ED. Having a dedicated wing for Covid has been good, but sometimes it doesn’t get filled, leaving vacant beds that can’t be filled by non-Covid patients.”
Hospital staff say if it’s not an emergency, people were encouraged to see their doctor or call Healthline on 0800 611 116 for health advice.
The nurses’ organisation has in the past issued staffing-related improvement notices on hospital management, including one to the then-Hawke’s Bay District Health Board in September 2021.
