A record number of patients with the most serious, life-threatening conditions were treated by paramedics and emergency departments in the last quarter of 2023.
Hip replacements and heart problems have kept patients in NSW public hospitals for longer than five years ago, as the state government is confronted by unprecedented demands on the state’s health system.
While acute patients spent an average of 4.7 days in hospital, non-acute patients admitted to public hospitals from October to December 2023 averaged 16.7 days, up from 14.8 days in the same three months of 2018. “At a time when hospitals are so busy, looking at how long patients spend in hospital is really important,” Watson said. “Our focus was on finding opportunities to reduce length of stay that were unrelated to COVID-19.”
Hip replacement recipients are also spending slightly longer recovering in hospital than they did five years ago, despite medical advancements reducing recovery times overseas and decreasing length of stay for the other most common joint surgery of knee replacements.