Reporting ambulance performance in Hospital Quarterly
The Bureau of Health Information will not report on ambulance performance measures in the January to March 2013 issue of Hospital Quarterly.
This issue will report on the number of patients who travelled to the emergency department by ambulance. It will not report on the time that it took for patients to be transferred from the ambulance into the care of emergency department staff, known as ‘off stretcher time’.
The Bureau has recently received access to new data that we are analysing to identify new ways of reporting on the journeys of patients who arrive at hospital by ambulance.
Initial analysis of the new data by the Bureau suggests there may be differences across NSW in how information about patients who arrive by ambulance is recorded. These differences could make it difficult to accurately compare hospitals.
The Bureau is now conducting a thorough analysis and looking at options for future reporting that measures the time that it took for patients to be transferred from the ambulance into thecare of emergency department staff in a fair and comparable way.
The Bureau expects to complete its analyses and revise how we report on this performancemeasure in Hospital Quarterly reports to be published later in the year.