MyHospitals website a good start but more detail needed
AMA President, Dr Andrew Pesce, said today that the AMA is encouraged that the Government has taken the first step to providing more accessible information to the public about hospitals via the new MyHospitals website.
Dr Pesce said the community needs transparent information about how our hospitals perform.
“Although MyHospitals is in its first phase of development, it has the potential to provide meaningful information about the quality of hospital services and how Government funding is used to provide access and services for patients,” Dr Pesce said.
“MyHospitals will provide the public with historical individual hospital information such as services provided, levels of activity, and elective surgery and emergency department waiting times.
“However, nearly all of the data is over a year old.
“The AMA hopes that, over time, the website will provide more comprehensive and timely information as it becomes available, especially in regard to hospital bed numbers.
“At this stage, MyHospitals only reports on the number of staffed beds in each hospital in broad categories, and this information will be over a year old by the time it appears.
“There is currently no information on bed occupancy rates.
“The AMA has urged the Government to establish a monitoring system called Bedwatch to conduct a national stocktake of the actual numbers of beds needed in each hospital to provide safe care.
“Bedwatch would track existing beds, new beds and bed occupancy rates to ensure that bed occupancy rates in public hospitals meet the AMA’s preferred level of 85 per cent bed occupancy.
“This is important information that should be made available on MyHospitals,” Dr Pesce said.
16 July 2010
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