TEAMWORK was behind Wodonga hospital’s top emergency department performance, its boss said yesterday.
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Associate director Dr Hamid Ahmadi said the result would make the emergency department work even “better and more enthusiastically”.
A total of 83 per cent of all patients departed the Wodonga emergency department within four hours during 2011-12.
“I think in any place it can be achievable,” Dr Ahmadi said.
“But the thing here is we have a good number of doctors who are attending to patients and we also have the support of the hospital in Albury with transferring or accepting patients.”
He said the number of obstetrics patients, who could be quickly assessed and either admitted to the maternity ward or discharged, helped with the throughput of patients.
“It’s about teamwork in my opinion,” he said.
“We have the support of a medical team, the surgical team, the surgical and medical ward, paediatrics, gynaecology and theatre time as well as the administrative team.
“We also have a group of nurses and doctors dedicated to this.”
He said whether it was a junior or senior doctor, the protocol in the hospital’s emergency ward was to decide within 20 to 30 minutes whether the patient needed to be admitted or not.
Dr Ahmadi said sometimes events were beyond the hospital’s control and the four-hour time frame could not be met.
“I was very happy when I saw the report this morning,” he said.
“I knew we were doing good but I wasn’t sure that it was that good.”
Dr Ahmadi said the renovation of the emergency ward might make the targets a little harder to achieve, though he was confident the team would respond to the challenge.
