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Hidden Healthcare: When hospital beds are like gold dust

Tricia Elliott’s day is often determined by her phone.

Some days it rings interminably to the point she considers throwing it down the toilet, while other days a calmer relationship exists between the two.

Tricia manages around 400 inpatient beds at Bendigo Hospital and as such, is a woman in demand.

“You get constant phone calls and people don’t want to leave a message, they want an answer then and there, so you just answer it,” she says, with the phone humming in the background.

Tricia can often be found in medical huddles across the hospital, scouting for beds.

“I try to ensure patients are going through the hospital in a timely manner, you have to make it all about the patient,” she said.

“Sometimes you get it wrong, but you try and organise beds so elective surgery isn’t cancelled because people have great expectations coming into hospital to have surgery and they get very anxious about it so you try and make sure they’ve got the beds.”

Tricia was the first dedicated bed manager at Bendigo Health, arriving at the hospital in 2004 at a less organised time, when, she says, elective surgery cancellation rates were as high as 25 per cent.

“People would just get cancelled, whole lists, and you’d have beds everywhere. It wasn’t fair to patients,” she said.

“We had a few robust discussions mixed with some humour and stopped people from hiding beds.

“That just doesn’t happen anymore. People understand that behaviour is not acceptable.”

With an ageing population in central Victoria and steadily increasing hospital admissions, beds are like gold.

“Demand has gone through the roof, and because it’s a shiny new hospital everyone from Uluru to the South Australian border and everywhere in between wants to come for a look see,” she said.

The hospital’s Emergency Department has experienced steady growth and now treats, on average, 2,000 more patients each year than the old hospital.

Current projections show around 56,000 patients will go through the emergency department in the 2018-19 financial year – an increase of 8000 from 2014-15. 

Tricia pushes for discharges and transfers to other hospitals or nursing homes to free up space for the next round of patients.

She recalls coming into work one winter’s morning with 18 people in ED needing a bed, when none were available.

“It’s like the deck chairs on the titanic, you keep moving them around,” she said.