Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania

Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania is the second oldest public hospital in Australia which also collaborates with the University of Tasmania and serves as a teaching hospital. In spite of its reputation, The Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania faces many difficulties while carrying out their healthcare services. The hospital is overcrowded with patients seeking medical help and they fail to provide them adequate accommodation (Morley et al., 2017). The nurses often complain of the overcrowded emergency unit of the hospital and they had taken the initiative to solve the problem but were prevented from doing so. The escalation policies that are formed to mend the problem are ineffective. The Hobart Hospital Tasmania are facing problems related to occupational health problems and their safety, the safety and well being of their patient.

The hospital lacks adequate amount of beds to accommodate this huge number of the patients who come here to seek medical help in the emergency unit (Walsh et al., 2016). The lack of adequate number of the beds is creating pressure and they discharge patients rather than admitting them in the hospital. These problems result in the long waiting time in the emergency unit in the Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania. This also increases the risk of deterioration in the patient’s condition admitted with severe illness as they had to wait for a long time for the specialists to attend them.

The hospital is running lack of funding which is preventing them to solve the problems they are facing regularly and they fail to provide the required healthcare to the community (Fedele, 2017). The number of patients in emergency unit does not get the required services and it often leads to the death of the older patient. 

The information was gathered by talking with the patients at first and I helped them to share the problems that they are facing during their treatments. Next I took information from the patient’s family, attending nurses and the doctors. The hospital supervisors were also interrogated and some of the information was collected regarding the problems that the hospital is facing.

The analysis requires the information related to the number of deaths occurring due to the lack of the accommodation in the emergency unit. The study of these death rates and age groups of the suffering population must be noted in order to assess the present scenario of the hospital. The unwillingness of the hospital management to reveal the exact the number of the deaths occurring due to their inefficiency is becoming a serious problem in analyzing. The threats that the hospital are facing are not clearly revealed. The information regarding their budget problem was not clearly stated which is also becoming a barrier in proceeding with the analysis. This information is necessary in order to bring forth the different strategies and suggesting a number of interventions that the hospital management can adopt to improve their standard of health care services. The information that is not collected properly are of much help and it would promote the services provided by the specialists.

The nurses and the healthcare staffs though sharing their problems but unwilling to reveal the inefficiency from their part. The information related to the number of untrained nurses could not be gathered. This also proves to be another important information as the patients admitted to the emergency unit could not get the proper service along with the bed block problems (Richardson, 2017). Interventions could not be suggested regarding this problem and the death rates would increase.

In spite of being the second oldest and reputed hospital in Australia, the Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania continues to face major problems (Chang & Daly, 2015). The problems include the lack of adequate number of beds, the lack of funding of the hospital authorities and their disability to arrange the same and the exceeding number of populations seeking medical help that outnumbers the bed. The main reason is the numbers of people who are admitted in the emergency unit outnumber the beds available (Singleton, Huang & Porter, 2014). This increases the waiting time of the patient and worsen their condition as they could not get an immediate help from the specialists. The patients are found to lie on the floor for hours untreated due to the bed blocks.

Evidences from various reports by the physicians of Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania reveal that the state budget of 2017 is incapable of handling the pressure of admissions in winter. The association chairman of the Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania claimed that required measures have not been adopted to deal with the bed blocks in the emergency unit (Sinha, & Page, 2015). The state budget does not meet the problems of bed surge and they will be incapable of admitting the huge number of patients in their hospital in the winters. Another problem they will be facing when they will demolish one of their blocks in their hospital premises. These will create more bed block problems for the next few more months.

The ramping of the ambulance and the under-staffing are the two other problems that accompany the bed block problem of the Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania (Thomas et al., 2014). This problem made the hospital one of the poor service providers to the people seeking emergency medical help. The chronic underfunding of the hospital makes the patients suffer from serious complications that even lead to their death.

The Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania Medical Staff Association in collaboration with other organizations like Australian Medical Association and the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation have raised their concerns about this problems faced by the hospital in a joint statement. A huge number of patients are dying because of this bed block problem which is the outcome of the lack of funding by the government (Keijzers et al., 2015). The government is not taking the initiative to provide adequate funding to the hospital so that they can arrange for beds and provide better service to their patients in an emergency.

The change in the population is making the Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania inefficient and incapable of providing the desired medical services because of the lack of staffs, accommodations and the equipments available (Campbell, Stirling & Cummings, 2017). The state government has assured to provide fund in a short time projects that would help them to expand the intensive care unit for the neonatal and upgrading them which includes the beds in the ICU departments in the paediatric unit of the hospital.

A vast number of population seeking medical help are greatly affected as the hospital management could provide accommodations to them. The old people are often seen lying on the floor for hours untreated. The condition often worsens as the patients in the emergency unit do not get the immediate services from the doctors (Cadilhac et al., 2017). They need to wait for long hours in order to get services from the specialists and their physical condition gets deteriorated which often results in the death of the patient. Patients who are admitted in the psychiatry unit suffer from the lack of attending staffs in the unit (Porter & Singleton, 2017). The standards of the existing nurses are not up to the mark and they seek knowledge in this field. Report evidences from The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists submitted to the Upper House states that this unit of the hospital also lacks bed and the services from the specialists for the young patients who are admitted to this unit.

The Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania faces major problems while carrying out public healthcare services. These problems include the lack of beds in the hospital which lead to the ‘bed block’ problem, lack of efficient staffs in some of the units like the psychiatry unit, lack of equipments, underfunding and many more. The hospital management is seeking help from the state governments in order to overcome their problem.

Interventions are adopted for the development of the hospital. A two phase planning for the development has been carried out by the Department of Health and Human Services in collaboration with Health Planning consultants Conrad Gargett Architecture of Brisbane (Campbell, Stirling & Cummings, 2017). The project includes a primary analysis of the population seeking emergency help form the hospital, the demand of the services delivered by them and many more (Sharman et al., 2017). This phase one program enables to resolve the urgent needs of providing the adequate number of beds to accommodate the patients in the emergency unit and the promotion of the services that is meant to the be delivered to the patients. The strategies for the improvement of the hospital include the modification in the role of the administrators of the hospitals and the clinical facilities.

Steps must be taken by the hospital authorities to provide proper training to the nurses attending the psychiatric unit in order to improve the standard of the medical help to the young people who are being admitted in this unit. A number of patients who are admitted to the Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania have taken the initiative to form a group and detail their concerns. These will be of much help to the hospital to improve their drawbacks in their services.

The hospital authorities have taking initiative to provide an on-site training accommodation for the nurses so that they would also be able to attend the patients while carrying on their training. They have also proposed to form The Ambulatory Care Unit which would help to provide services like injections, infusion of the drugs and other such medical services to the non-admitted patients (Xu et al., 2015). This initiative from the hospital would minimize the number of patients who are seeking emergency help and expand their limit of providing the service.

The hospital management must give priority to the funding of the health system. The lack of funding is making them inefficient in providing standard health services to the patients admitted to the emergency unit. The provision of the adequate funding to the Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania from the state government may help to improve their services. The increased funding would enable them to arrange for more beds, thus increasing the number of rooms and beds to accommodate more number of patients in the emergency unit (Chan, 2014). The pressure on the emergency department of the hospital can be minimized by opening a number of beds which would increase the number of patients to be admitted in this department. This would also help to provide better and immediate healthcare service to the sick people. They should also ensure that the doctors, nurses and other staffs related to the healthcare services of the hospital possess the required qualifications, skills and that they are capable of providing a high standard of health care to the patients admitted to the emergency unit.

The above discussion states the major problem faced by the Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania, the second oldest public hospital providing healthcare to the people. They are incapable of providing a standard medical help to their patient as they lack adequate accommodations and often the patients outnumber the beds. This creates bed block problem. They also lack the required funding and trained high standard nurses and the patients need to wait for the long time in the emergency unit for the specialists. This worsens their health condition and a number of people die due to this. The hospital management has taken various intervention strategies and is working on them to improve their services. The initiative of opening a number of new beds, collaborating with the state government for funds and appointing standard nurses and specialists of required knowledge would help to improve their services. Thus to conclude, The Royal Hobart Hospital Tasmania in other words are trying to improve their healthcare approaches by increasing the number of beds and specialist nurses.

References

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