As important Central Adelaide Local Health Network partners, we wanted to let you know that this morning we instigated a major incident to assist us to manage the high demand on our services at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and The Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Declaring an incident in this way allows us to establish our Network Incident Command Centre (NICC) to assist with the coordination and deployment of resources to fast track a range of actions that will help emergency patients to get to the beds they need. We are also focusing on discharging patients who no longer need an acute bed.
Over the next 12-24 hours CALHN will focus on securing additional inpatient bed capacity (public and private), additional community capacity and support for our patients. Our priority is to appropriately and safely move patients from the RAH & TQEH emergency departments and to ensure we have capacity for any patient requiring tertiary or quaternary care. This is for general adult admissions and our mental health consumers.
We encourage our community partners to consider using CALHN’s Sefton Park Hospital Avoidance Supported Discharge Service (HASDS), the CICC (CALHN Intermediate Care Coordinator) team who can advise and direct GPs on the best option for patients, Priority Care Centres and the My Home Hospital service. In addition, the Urgent Mental Health Care Centre is available for mental health patients.
CICC team - contact 0475 813 345
Hospital Avoidance Supported Discharge Service - contact 0435 237 270
While the major incident is in place, CALHN will prioritise category 1 surgery and procedures. Be assured our emergency departments will continue to accept patients who are seriously ill and GPs should not hesitate to refer in this instance.
We aim to get our services back into business as usual as soon as possible as we appreciate that calling a major incident can be disruptive for patients, our partners and our workforce.
Thank you for assisting us to provide the very best care to the South Australian community.
Patient safety drives everything that we do.
Warm regards,
Brendan Docherty
Executive Director, Operations
Central Adelaide Local Health Network
