Six-hour hospital target associated with fewer deaths

Six-hour hospital target associated with fewer deaths in emergency departments

New research shows that New Zealand’s six-hour emergency department target was associated with a reduction in crowding in emergency departments by half.

The target – which aims to limit the amount of time people stay in hospital emergency departments – was also associated with hundreds of fewer patients dying, compared to what was predicted if pre-target trends had continued.

Director of Emergency Medicine at Auckland City Hospital, Dr Peter Jones, and University of Auckland researcher Linda Chalmers co-led an investigation into the effects of the mandatory six-hour national target on patient outcomes with the support of a $1.1 million project grant from the Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC).

The study examined various indicators of quality of patient care in 18 of New Zealand’s 20 district health boards (DHBs) over a period of seven years (2006–2012), and included an in-depth investigation of four hospitals.

“We found that the introduction of the six-hour target was associated with a substantial 50 per cent reduction in the number of patient deaths in emergency departments,” said Dr Jones, “That’s about 700 fewer deaths than predicted if pre-target trends had continued. This result mirrors the 50 per cent reduction in emergency department crowding,”

“There was also no increase in deaths on the wards, so there was no evidence that the observed reduction was due to ‘shifting’ deaths to elsewhere in the system.”

Dr Jones will be exploring the results of the survey in more depth in his presentation ‘How did ED length-of-stay patterns change as a consequence of the ED target implementation, and why?’ at 2.45pm on Thursday 24 November.

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