"Admittance to Eye and Ear Hospital"

I was very impressed with the process in place at the Eye and Ear Hospital Emergency Department for my father being admitted for further eye surgery, following a complication of cataract surgery in another hospital in regional Victoria. He had a referral, which explained the situation of why we were there.

It was great to have someone at the start of the process, who welcomed you and then explained where to go to see the triage nurse. Everyone I dealt with was very polite and we progressed through the triage, registration and assessment process in a reasonable amount of time. While I was doing the registration they were assessing my dad at the same time. In particular, I would like to say thank you to Ash the nurse who did the initial assessment, put in the line, took blood for various tests and gave the initial intravenous dose of medication and eye drops. She was very polite and answered all our questions about what was happening and why, e.g. why the medication needed to be pushed through over a certain period of time and that it would help to lower the eye pressure.

In the background, other staff were sorting out the bed, financial arrangements and the medication that Ash administered. We waited for a bed after the assessment in the internal waiting area and it was not an unreasonable length of time, though we were both pretty exhausted at that stage! We had travelled from northern Victoria leaving at in the morning that day, (4 hour trip) then waited for the specialist appointment (running 1 1/2 hours late but I suspect we had been a referral squeeze in for him due to the urgent nature of the complication), then the ED process from around mid-afternoon with dad getting a bed around 6 hours after we arrived that day.

It would be great to achieve streamlining of data collection between ED and the ward as we had to verbally repeat information already given, (e.g. medications that dad was on, contact details) but that perhaps requires improved information technology systems with associated budgets. One would also hope that one day data transfer between different health services can be achieved. The dream - a connected health data network across Victoria or even interstate!

Thank you to all involved at the Eye and Ear Hospital, you do a great job.