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 provision of 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 2010–11, public hospitals provided almost 43 million services for non-admitted patients:
- specialist outpatient clinics delivered 16.7 million services, with the chief contributors being medical/surgical/obstetric and allied health. Most (13.0 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 3.4 million service episodes.
- pharmacy, pathology, radiology and organ imaging made up a further 17.2 million services
- district nursing, outreach and community health services accounted for 5.3 million service episodes
- 318,000 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 about a third of these sessions.
Between 2006–07 and 2010–11, outpatient care delivered in specialist outpatient clinics increased by an average of 1.3% per year; pharmacy, pathology and radiology and organ imaging services increased by 3.6% per year; mental health and alcohol and drug services increased by 1.8% per year; and district nursing, outreach and community health services decreased by about 1.1% per year (Figure 13).
Private hospitals
In 2009–10, private hospitals provided about 1.5 million non-admitted patient services (3.5% of the total for public and private hospitals), with about 1.3 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. They also provided about 223,000 other services for non-admitted patients: community health, district nursing and non-medical and social services (4.1% of the total for public and private hospitals) (ABS 2011).