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Care Opinion

Triage process at the hospital

Posted By julytt35

"Triage process at the hospital"

About: Fiona Stanley Hospital / Emergency Department

(as a service user),

I believe the triage in this hospital is appalling. I feel you wait and wait, suffering, before being triaged. I understand the idea of triage is to make it fast so that other decisions flow on. Not here I feel. It seems the point of triage is to make you wait while they appear to laugh and joke and ignore people. I feel the staff I saw do not listen. I listed my symptoms over and over again but I think the nurse must have been elsewhere in their mind as it seemed nothing went in. They got almost every detail wrong.

After many hours, most people left, but I felt there was still no chance of being seen. Instead, the nurses I saw came around and took observations and discussed your condition in public. I feel this is not first-world care.

It seemed that nobody I saw was remotely interested in my worsening condition. I believe they like the big accidents, but everything else, they really seem to think you’re wasting your time. I was suffering from a quite severe condition which I believe every doctor will say needs immediate care. But I never got the care. I became so unwell in the waiting room I felt it was better to go home and self-medicate.

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Responses

Response from Neil Doverty, Executive Director Fiona Stanley and Fremantle Hospitals Group, South Metropolitan Health Service 7 months ago
Neil Doverty
Executive Director Fiona Stanley and Fremantle Hospitals Group,
South Metropolitan Health Service

Submitted on 4/10/2023 at 12:04 PM
Published on Care Opinion at 12:32 PM

picture of Neil Doverty

Dear julytt35,

I am very sorry for the long wait you experienced in the ED; I hope that you are ok now and have checked in with your GP regarding your condition.

The triage process at FSH follows the same triage process at all Australian Emergency Departments, utilising the Australasian Triage Assessment Scale (ATS). All patients, upon presentation, are triaged by the Triage Nurse and assigned a triage category between 1 and 5, Category 1 being an immediately life-threatening condition that requires immediate simultaneous assessment and treatment to Category 5 - a chronic or minor condition which can be assessed and treated within two hours. The point of triage is not to increase waiting time, but primarily to ensure that those who are the sickest are seen to as a priority.

The nurses that you describe taking observations sound like our Waiting Room Nurses (WRN) – who do indeed monitor patients while in the waiting room awaiting formal assessment, to make sure that if any patient’s conditions deteriorates, they are escalated quickly. In addition to our WRNs, we also have the Aishwarya’s Care Call, for any patient or concerned companions to call if they feel they are worsening and still not being assessed or treated appropriately.

I don’t know exactly when you attended so I am unable to provide you with a breakdown of the number of people in our ED while you were there or the level of acuity. Regardless, I do apologise for the long wait you describe experiencing.

Again – I hope you have since sought medical treatment for your condition and I am sorry your experience did not meet your expectations.

Kind regards,

Neil Doverty.

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