CV and mad panic behaviour

[kruddler]

Interesting perspective:
‘Health system in distress’: how ambulance ramping became a major problem, The Guardian.

In short, ambulance ramping is a problem across the States and increasing the number of ambulances isn’t the silver bullet. Access bottlenecks due to shortages of hospital staff and beds and the aged care sector’s reliance on hospitals were exacerbated by Covid.

I know someone who works in a hospital who liases with ambulance services as part of their job to decide what types of patients they must take at any given time and which patients they must ship off to other hospitals.
So....heart attacks might be high risk, but falls or concussions etc might go somewhere else.
These decisions are ever changing depending on how each hospital is coping at any given time.

Hospitals get overwhelmed with ambulances dropping off patients. The thing is an ambulance cannot simply drop a patient at the door and leave for the next one. They have to wait until the patient gets signed over. If there is 1 (or 2) people whose job that is to take a patient, assess them and send them where they need to be and then get back down to the next ambulance, that takes some time.
If there are 17 ambulances out the front, that takes a lot of time to get through.
That time is people waiting for an ambulance elsewhere.

You can have 3000 ambulances out there, but if they are stuck at hospitals waiting to drop off patients, it doesn't help the system.

You need to eliminate the bottle neck first....and the bottle neck is at hospitals.

Its been the problem all along, Covid is overwhelming the hospitals.....and everyone else is suffering as a result.