00:00It's a busy morning at St Vincent's emergency department in Melbourne and many of the patients
00:07are elderly. This man was brought in after blacking out on the street.
00:11Have you had other falls in the past? Geriatrician Richard Kane is doing the
00:19rounds of the older patients in an effort to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions.
00:24Being in hospital for an older person is a more risky experience than being in their
00:28own homes in many ways. Beverly Minogue's knee gave out last month and she was
00:32unable to climb the stairs to her bedroom. I've got osteoarthritis it's just it's all
00:39worn out it's bone on bone. When the 85 year old went to emergency she was
00:44expecting a lengthy hospital stay but thanks to a new program which embeds a
00:48geriatrician in the emergency department she went home the next day with daily
00:52visits from nurses and specialists instead. We find that people recover more
00:57quickly in their own environment. I think it's wonderful because like you can stay
01:02home you don't have to be stuck in the hospital and not be able to sleep. Hospital
01:07data shows that more than a hundred older patients have been diverted from wards
01:11like this one to either home rehabilitation or aged care over a one
01:16year period and more than 900 days of in-hospital care have been avoided. On any
01:22given day three or four patient beds are available for other patients upstairs that
01:26would otherwise have been filled by these patients. And the data suggests there was
01:31no increase in patients who were diverted coming back to hospital. Programs like this
01:36are increasing as the number of hospital beds per 1,000 people aged over 65 declines
01:41halving in the last 30 years. It's really quite a frightening glimpse into the
01:47future. The peak doctors group says any incoming federal government must
01:52prioritize a new longer-term funding agreement for hospitals to ensure they
01:56can meet these challenges. We also want to make sure that that funding drives the
02:01kind of care that we want and that our elderly Australians need. Labor has endorsed
02:06an increase in federal funding but not yet brokered a new agreement. The coalition
02:10says it would negotiate a new agreement as a matter of urgency.
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