00:01The Australian College for Emergency Medicine releases a report each year focusing on a
00:06key healthcare issue and this year they focused on Australia's aging population and the looming
00:12health crisis which comes with it. Effectively they've focused on emergency department presentations
00:18over a five-year period to look at what sort of trends we can see and what they found is
00:22a pretty dramatic increase in the number of lengthy wait times in emergency departments
00:28especially for older patients. The college says that the pressures that are being felt across
00:32the aged care system in the country are spilling into emergency departments and hospitals. Now one
00:38of the key figures which the college highlighted was the number of older patients who waited upwards
00:44of 24 hours in an emergency department for a hospital bed and they looked at figures from 2018-19 and
00:51compared them to figures in 2023-24. That's a five-year period and across that time that figure
00:57jumped from 15,000 patients to more than 50,000 patients. So that's again that's more than 50,000
01:05older patients waiting upwards of 24 hours in an emergency department to be admitted into a hospital
01:11bed. Now those are historical figures which the college has used to highlight the trend over time
01:16but the college president says that it is an ongoing issue. Let's take a listen.
01:22It's now become almost routine for anybody that turns up to spend 12 hours sitting in a plastic chair
01:29in a waiting room. Recently I'm aware of a 97-year-old that spent all night sitting in a plastic
01:35chair
01:36in one of my local emergency departments. So Kayson, how have governments responded to this report so far?
01:42Well the Federal Health and Ageing Minister Mark Butler has been keen to highlight the work which the
01:47government has already done in this space including what he described as a historic investment into
01:53state and territory hospitals to improve them and access to them. But Mark Butler also did acknowledge
01:59that this is an issue which needs to be addressed and an issue which needs to be addressed not only
02:04in
02:05emergency departments and hospitals across the country but also more broadly across the health
02:09system especially in aged care. Let's have a listen to what he said.
02:13Australia is at a tipping point right now. It's the oldest baby boomers start to enter their 80s.
02:20Their need for good quality aged care and health services is skyrocketing frankly and that's a
02:26challenge for all governments not just the Commonwealth government.
02:29In a statement Mark Butler has said that or urged state governments to deliver on their promises to
02:36improve access to hospitals and health care but in the college's report they made a range of
02:41recommendations to both state and federal governments to address the issue.
