Heart Foundation chief medical adviser Garry Jennings said that during the pandemic many people with chest pain delayed seeking treatment, while others were successfully treated at home when they previously would have required hospital admission.
“This likely means that those in hospital may be more severe and require more intensive management, leading to an increase in length of stay,” he said. “As the heart failure population tends to be older … discharge is often delayed because people have nowhere to go.”
Jennings said he would like to see more community programs to prevent and treat heart disease without needing to go to hospital, more action against tobacco and vaping products, and a sugar levy imposed on junk food manufacturers.
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.
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Ian Harris, a professor of orthopaedic surgery at the University of NSW, said that Australian hospitals should be aiming for an average closer to three days.
“Other countries are doing it, and clearly some hospitals in Australia are doing it, too,” he said.
A patient receiving a hip replacement can spend anywhere from three to six days in hospital depending on where in NSW they live, the report shows.
Patients at Goulbourn and Grafton hospitals, for example, spend just over three days in hospital on average, while patients at Mt Druitt hospital spend over five.
Eight hospitals across NSW have signed up to trial same-day joint surgeries in a key strategy to come from the elective surgery taskforce unveiled by Health Minister Ryan Park shortly after Labor won the 2023 state election.
Health Minister Ryan Park.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Park said similar efforts were being made to improve emergency department performance, with a separate ED taskforce “considering ways to safely embrace innovative strategies to treat patients more effectively”.
“We are throwing everything in our ruck sack at improving access and reducing wait times in our hospitals,” he said.