A LACK of beds in hospitals and residential aged care is causing long waits in hospital emergency departments and putting older people's lives at risk, new research has shown.
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The Australasian College of Emergency Medicine says older people are most likely to endure long emergency department waits and are most at risk from lengthy delays.
Its report follows Canberra Hospital research undertaken earlier this year which showed older patients who waited more than four hours to be transferred to a bed were 51 per cent more likely to die than patients who waited less than four hours.
It also comes as Victoria announced it would follow other states and territories in abandoning the hospital bypass system, which allows hospital emergency departments to ask ambulances to bypass them with non-urgent patients.
From October 7 Victorian hospitals will be required to accept all patients arriving by ambulance, except in exceptional circumstances.
ACEM found more than 70 per cent of patients in Australian emergency departments were waiting more than eight hours to be moved to a hospital bed after receiving emergency care.
Almost 80 people had waited more than 24 hours for a bed, and in six cases people had waited two days.
Study lead Associate Professor Drew Richardson said more than half of the 121 hospitals surveyed had at least one patient who had been waiting for a bed for at least 12 hours, the point at which the NHS in the United Kingdom requires a report to the minister.
"A statistic like that should be sending an alarm bell to healthcare authorities across the country," Associate Professor Richardson said.
"It's completely unacceptable.
"The figures reflect a hospital system that is critically overburdened and that is putting patients into the firing line."
College president Anthony Cross said waiting was particularly stressful for older patients.
"They wait on ambulance trolleys because the emergency department is full, and the emergency department is full because the hospital wards are full, and the hospital wards are full because we've got an ageing population and the aged care residential services aren't as big as we need," he said.
"I wonder whether (authorities) see the human face of it, whether they see what it actually means for frail elderly patients to spend extended periods of time in an emergency department cubicle.
"For an elderly person in the middle of the night, surrounded by the noise and the light and the action and all the carry-on on a relatively uncomfortable bed, it's terrible conditions.
"The worst aspect of this is that patients are being put at risk, and this is not acceptable."
