Professor Mick Malloy

But you did give them the advice to come to the emergency department if there were any problems.

So we have a little bit of a gap in the understanding of what an emergency department should do and should function as.

That is a really, really interesting point.

And it's something that we have discussed at length among our own group of colleagues who work together.

And, excuse me, we have differing opinions on it.

Some are afraid that patients who have been triaged at three might leave and get worse at home.

when they should remain and wait to be seen, and that those with a five may actually have a second problem, which is actually of higher precedence than what their triage note dictates, because they didn't understand that the other issue they have going on is more serious, and they put priority on the lower priority issue.

medical complaint themselves.

It's complex and any change to a particular system would take quite a while for it to bed in and to get a common shared understanding among all the medical side of the system and the patients to make sure it works effectively.

And that is because they've had unfortunate cases where people have been told you're going to wait a long time, have left and have suffered a significant deterioration and then come back at a later point with a more difficult to treat condition.

We were in the very unusual situation during the COVID pandemic where we were actually encouraging patients to try and come to the emergency department.

Such was the drop-off.

in attendances, particularly for medical conditions where you would have, sorry now this sounds statistically, what's the word I'm looking for here, benign, but you would expect a certain number of heart attacks and strokes and whatever.

And over a period of time, we were not seeing these and we were worried that people were sitting at home

not asking for attention because they were so afraid of COVID at the time that people were not presenting.

So we were in the unusual position of encouraging people to attend, such was the fall off in attendances.

That has completely reversed and now attendances are higher than ever, unfortunately.

And this means that at times people can have waits and we're looking for initiatives within the hospital systems to treat things as effectively as you can to make sure there's as minimal delays as you can.

But there are two essentially compounding issues here.

One is the need to treat the people with the most urgent conditions as quickly as possible.