"ED care"

Dear Bmx bandit,

Thank you for sharing your care experience and for acknowledging the wonderful nursing staff at Collie hospital who provide great care for their patients and the Collie community day in, day out.

Following the recent AusCycling BMX State Series event, hosted by Collie BMX Club, I have checked in with nursing staff and the doctor involved in caring for patients from the event. I have also followed up processes of event notification to the hospital and requested a review of Emergency Department (ED) activity on the day of the event, and that a debrief with staff occur.

The review of ED activity found that multiple patients presented to the hospital from the event, and that the number of patients presenting to the ED was consistent with the average daily number of patients presenting to the hospital. When patients began presenting from the event, staff were called to help, and patients were managed safely by the nurses, nurse practitioner and doctor. The concern that staff fed back has been about adequate event notification; to enable better preparedness in the event more patients presented and potentially overwhelmed the ED.

I have also contacted the Collie BMX Club President who has apologised for the lack of prompt notification to the hospital. All public and private events with more than 500 patrons should be registered with the Department of Health before proceeding and this did not occur, with very late notice via phone of the event. The BMX club was not aware of the need to register the event, nor had event medical plans been provided to the hospital.

The Collie BMX Club has committed to ensuring this occurs for future races and is also ensuring the governing body AusCycling is aware of the event notification process. I have provided the Collie BMX Club information to the public event registration website: Event registration (Google -Department of Health WA Event Registration). I have sincerely thanked the Collie BMX Club President who advised they had sent information to the Shire, but not to the hospital, and who is taking a proactive approach to lessons learnt from the weekends event.

With many and varied events happening across the community it is important that event organisers and other agencies are informing the Collie Hospital management of their events including their risk management and event medical plans and registering events on the Department of Health website for publication on the Events Calendar. Registration can be done regardless of number of patrons and ensures situational awareness of events at a local and state level. Events also need notification to the Collie Shire and other agencies for proper planning and Emergency Management purposes. Collie Hospital Director of Nursing-Health Service Manager Barry Moroney is a member on the Shire of Collie, Local Emergency Management Committee and will be raising the issue of event notification at the next meeting.

Thankyou again for your feedback. If there are any issues you would like to discuss about the specifics of your care at Collie Hospital so this can be investigated, please do not hesitate to contact me on M: 0438 062 341

Jeremy Higgins

Operations Manager

WA Country Health Service, Inland Southwest