THE Western NSW Local Health District (WNSWLHD) has praised its staff and hospitals for continuing to improve their performance, even as demands upon them increased.
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The comments follow the release of the Bureau of Health Information's (BHI) latest quarterly report, which includes data on key performance measures across public health services in NSW during the January to March, 2023 quarter.
Bathurst Health Service, Dubbo Hospital and Orange Health Service all fall within the WNSWLHD area, as do health facilities in Cowra, Forbes and Mudgee.
Chief executive officer of the WNSWLHD, Mark Spittal, was pleased to see some improvements in the first quarter of 2023, compared to the last quarter of 2022.
These occurred at a time when, generally, attendances to emergency departments and arrivals by ambulance increased.
"The latest BHI Healthcare Quarterly report shows Western NSW LHD has improved in a number of key performance measures - including time to start treatment, and time to transfer patients from ambulance to ED staff, when compared with the preceding October to December 2022 quarter," Mr Spittal said.
"I want to thank our dedicated staff who continue to perform exceptionally in these challenging and busy times."
Throughout the first quarter of 2023, there were 49,650 attendances to the district's emergency departments, which was an increase of 4.5 per cent on the same quarter in 2022.
Orange Health Service and Dubbo Hospital both saw increases in emergency department attendances compared with the same quarter in 2022, with these health services seeing 7681 and 9913 attendances respectively.
That was an increase of 1.4 per cent for Orange and an increase of 4.4 per cent for Dubbo.
In Bathurst, however, there was a 5.2 per cent decrease in the number of attendances compared with the January to March quarter in 2022, with 6367 recorded in the first three months of 2023.
Across the health district as a whole, 82 per cent of patients started their treatment on time after attending the emergency department, which the WNSWLHD said was "significantly better" than the state average of 67.4 per cent.
The three major hospitals in the WNSWLHD area - Bathurst, Dubbo and Orange - also performed better than the state average.
While there was a decline in the percentage of patients being seen on time at Bathurst Health Service compared with the same period in 2022, it was only minor - 0.1 percentage points - and there were some positive signs of improvement when comparing the data with the previous quarter.
Between October and December, 2022, the percentage of patients starting treatment on time was 68.7 per cent, but from January to March, 2023 the percentage was 77 per cent.
In Dubbo, 74.3 per cent started their treatment on time, down 10.5 percentage points from the same quarter of 2022, but just 0.2 percentage points down on the figure from the last quarter of 2022.
Orange Health Service had the best percentage of the three major hospitals in the Western NSW Local Health District (WNSWLHD), with 81.4 per cent of patients starting treatment on time from January to March, 2023.
This was down by 0.5 percentage points from the same period in 2022, and up eight percentage points from the last quarter of 2022.
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