Tasmanian patient in her 70s died while waiting to be admitted to emergency department, having arrived at the hospital at midnight

The death of a woman who spent nine hours waiting to be admitted to a Tasmanian emergency department has highlighted dire staffing and resourcing issues across Australian hospitals.

A health union has confirmed a woman in her early 70s was taken to Launceston general hospital around midnight on Friday and died at 9am the following morning.

“When they arrived there was already ramping occurring so she wasn’t able to get a bed in the emergency department where the paramedics wanted to take her,” the Health and Community Services Union industrial manager, Robbie Moore, said.

When the woman died she had been ramped for nine hours, with paramedics remaining with her throughout, Moore said.

Ambulance ramping occurs when hospital emergency departments are at capacity, so paramedics tend to the patients in a separate area of the hospital until they can be admitted to the ED.

“This is not an isolated event, people are being ramped for over 12 hours on a regular basis,” Moore said.

“The system is failing us and letting down Tasmanians and this is a tragic circumstance that highlights how bad the situation is.”

Instances of ramping, or “access blocks”, have become a major problem at hospitals across Australia as the system faces increasing strain from staff shortages, rising Covid cases and cases of other winter illnesses.

In July a one-year-old baby girl died at a regional Victorian hospital that has been experiencing staff shortages.

A report published by the Australian Medical Association earlier this year revealed that no jurisdiction was meeting its performance targets for getting patients out of ambulances and into the emergency department.

The AMA president, Steve Robson, said the case of the Tasmanian woman was a “distressing … terrible tragedy” and showed that urgent action was needed on ramping.

“Things are difficult, Covid is making it difficult to get staff but this has gone on for two-and-a-half years now, we have to look at how we can reform,” he said.

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Reports of the death in Tasmania came after a 47-year-old man died in Adelaide on the side of a road amid claims he waited more than 40 minutes for an ambulance after suffering chest pains on Monday.

The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, said the death was “beyond tragic” and there would be a thorough investigation.

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The AMA has been running a campaign for over a year now to address “logjams” in public hospitals, with one solution being a new funding model that would see the commonwealth government making bigger contributions.

The proposal calls for $20.5bn across four years to create a 50-50 funding share between the commonwealth and states and territories, and for the removal of a 6.5% existing cap on funding growth.

President of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicines, Dr Clare Skinner, said the healthcare system as a whole was becoming outdated and needed to shift its focus from single patient interactions to “collaborative, multidisciplinary and longitudinal care”.

“People who haven’t had access to integrated … care in the community for months to years can develop chronic problems that get worse and they deteriorate to the stage where they need hospitalisation,” Dr Skinner said.

“[We need to] work out how to decompress that system and some of that is going to be adding capacity, and some of that is going to be making sure our processes are designed around the … real problems we see in clinical hospitals today.”

Dr Skinner said that further integration of federal and state healthcare responsibilities would help prevent patients from falling through the cracks.

This article was amended on 11 August 2022 to remove a reference to the Tasmanian woman waiting in an ambulance. She was waiting in another part of the hospital.