Opening more hospital emergency departments could have the unintended consequence of making waiting times longer for patients who require urgent care.
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But the addition of GP clinics at hospitals should help ease waiting times in emergency departments, according to a study by Monash University economists.
Modelling by Anurag Sharma and Brett Inder found that opening more emergency departments in a region could make waiting times for seriously ill patients longer by encouraging people with less-serious conditions to seek treatment at an ED.
"The results for non-urgent (category 5) patients suggest that more choice of EDs is related to longer waits for emergency (category 2) patients,'' they wrote.
"This might indicate a supply-induced demand effect, where ED catchments with higher number of EDs generate demand by non-urgent patients.''
But the researchers found that if hospital staff could send category 5 patients to a co-located GP clinic, the waiting time for category 2 patients would be cut by 19 per cent, or an average of 1.5 minutes.
Clinical guidelines state that category 2 patients should be seen by a doctor within 10 minutes of arrival at hospital.
"The effective ED demand management strategy will be to deliver non-urgent (category 5) patients to an alternative model of care (co-located GP clinics) rather than enhancing their ED choice,'' the researchers wrote.
Survey results published this week showed that 20 per cent of ACT adults had visited a hospital emergency department for care they believed could have been provided by a GP.
Only about half of the patients who attend Canberra's two public hospital emergency departments are seen on time, compared with a target of 70 per cent.
To combat the problem, the ACT government opened a free nurse-led walk-in clinic at the Canberra Hospital.
But some doctors have complained this attracts patients to the hospital campus who walk to the emergency department if the nurses in the clinic are unable to treat them.
The government plans to replace the clinic with new centres at Belconnen and Tuggeranong. The ACT Liberals have previously proposed the opening of "urgent care clinics'' staffed by doctors and nurses in Gungahlin and Tuggeranong.
The ACT government is planning to build a sub-acute hospital at the University of Canberra which will focus on areas such as rehabilitation.
The hospital will not have an emergency department.
The Monash University research was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council.