Outpatient care is provided in outpatient clinics, particularly by public hospitals, but also by private hospitals. Both types of hospitals also provide other non-admitted patient services (other than emergency department services) and various outreach services, such as district nursing.
Public hospitals
Outpatient clinic care includes consultations with specialists to determine the most appropriate treatment for a patient’s condition. This can result, for example, in the patient being placed on a waiting list for surgery.
Other care provided to non-admitted patients includes the dispensing of medication, and diagnostic procedures, including pathology, X-rays and ultrasounds—often provided in association with admitted patient care or outpatient clinic services. District and community nursing services are also delivered from hospitals for non-admitted patients.
In 2009–10, public hospitals provided over 42 million service episodes for non-admitted patients:
- specialist outpatient clinics delivered 16.8 million services, with the chief contributors being medical/surgical/obstetric and allied health. Most (12.8 million or 78%) were in Principal referral and Specialist women’s and children’s hospitals and Large hospitals.
- mental health and alcohol and drug services delivered 3.2 million service episodes.
- pharmacy, pathology, radiology and organ imaging made up a further 16.8 million services
- district nursing, outreach and community health services accounted for 5.3 million service episodes
- 328,000 service episodes were for group sessions (provided to more than one patient at a time), with mental health, alcohol and drug and community health accounting for 40% of the sessions.
Between 2005–06 and 2009–10, outpatient care delivered in specialist outpatient clinics increased by an average of 3.0% per year; pharmacy, pathology and radiology and organ imaging services increased by 3.8% per year; mental health and alcohol and drug services increased by 0.8% per year; and district nursing, outreach and community health services decreased by about 2.9% per year (Figure 14).
Figure 14: Non-admitted patient services, public hospitals, 2005–06 to 2009–10
Private hospitals
In 2008–09, private hospitals provided about 1.5 million non-admitted patient services (6.7% of the total for public and private hospitals), with about 1.1 million of these for outpatient services including dialysis, radiology and organ imaging, endoscopy, psychiatric, alcohol and drug, other medical/surgical/diagnostic, dental, pharmacy and allied health services (ABS 2010). They also provided about 206,000 other services for non-admitted patients (0.5% of the total for public and private hospitals): community health, district nursing and non-medical and social services.