Brisbane hospital makes big recovery A Brisbane hospital improved after having the slowest emergency department in Australia last year. A QUEENSLAND hospital has bounced back from the shame of having the slowest emergency department in Australia. Princess Alexandra Hospital's emergency department was singled out in 2012 for its tardiness, meeting time targets for only 33 per cent of patients. On Thursday it was named as the most improved based on 2013 figures, with 62 per cent of patients making it out of the department within the targeted four hours. "We have gone from from being far and away the worst to at least being in the middle of the pack," said Dr Andrew Staib, the deputy director of emergency department. It was a multi-faceted effort, he said. But there is still a lot of work to do. Queensland was the best performed state in Australia for the March 2013 quarter, with 11 of its 24 major hospitals meeting its 77 per cent target, according to National Health Performance Authority figures published on the MyHospitals website. All states and territories have agreed to a 90 per cent target by 2015. Dr Staib said the most important single change was a state ban on ambulance redirection by emergency departments. In the past if an emergency department believed it was overcrowded it could put itself on bypass. This meant other hospitals became swamped with queues of ambulances waiting to offload patients. Now arrivals are spread more evenly throughout the day. The entire hospital had been involved in the recovery, he said. One improvement led to another. There has been lots of support from the hospital and district. The patient flow through the hospital, from admission to discharge, needed to be improved so new patients from the emergency department had beds to go to. The target can only be met if the whole of the system is working efficiently. It can't just be met by doing the same things that we have always done but just a bit faster. He said there was good published evidence that patients subjected to long stays in the emergency department did not not do as well as patients who moved quickly through the process. But there are patients who are critically unwell and need a longer stay in the emergency department.