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North Shore Hospital's emergency care centre faced closure last weekend because of its doctor shortage, says a clinical director at the Auckland District Health Board.
Winter was tough for many patients at the Waitemata board's North Shore emergency centre, with long waits often on trolleys in corridors before being admitted to a hospital ward - days in some cases.
The board has opened extra beds in wards to ease the pressure and acknowledges a staff shortage late last week led to the possibility of ambulances being diverted elsewhere, but denies any plan to temporarily "close" North Shore's emergency centre to new patients.
Auckland board officials yesterday briefed the hospital committee on how the Auckland City Hospital and Starship children's hospital emergency departments coped during winter.
They said pressures at Waitemata's Waitakere and North Shore hospitals directly affected their own services.
"Waitakere Hospital [emergency centre] closed twice at short notice," said the clinical director of Starship's emergency department, Dr Richard Aickin. "Last weekend we had North Shore threatening to close their emergency department at short notice."
He said the service manager of Auckland's adults' emergency department, Jo Mack, had found locums for North Shore to avert the closure.
Ms Mack said such short-notice closures at other hospitals in the region placed huge pressure on the Auckland board's facilities.
Board chairman Wayne Brown said Waitemata had its own funding and Auckland must not "dumbly" accept Waitemata's problems without the latter having to find solutions.
"That's a classic ploy that's gone on for a long time. In the past it's been really easy to place Auckland at the bottom end of that chain and we accept responsibility and get all the negative publicity that's associated with that."
Waitemata's general manager of adult health services, Rachel Haggerty, said there was no intention to close North Shore's emergency centre and Waitakere's had not closed twice.
Waitakere's emergency centre had provided a reduced service from 4pm in a weekend in August until its usual overnight closure time of 10pm.
During those hours some patients, after being assessed, were given a free voucher for a local after-hours clinic, although she acknowledged some were seen at Starship or Auckland City Hospital.
Last week's problem was that one medical-officer shift for North Shore's emergency centre on Friday night remained unfilled until that morning, when a locum was arranged - and not the doctor suggested by Ms Mack.
"There was never on the table a decision to close the emergency care centre at North Shore Hospital."
