Stubborn management
Ten days ago, around 500 South Coast residents attended a public meeting at the Bega Civic Centre to express their total support for the magnificent team of orthopaedic surgeons who, up until recently, had diligently served the interests of this regional community.
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The Bega Valley Shire Residents and Ratepayers Association believes that most of the people at that meeting would have thought their massed voice in such a small community would have been enough to ensure that the impasse between hospital management and the surgeons would have been swiftly resolved. Certainly most went on their way with that belief.
Ten days later, with the NSW Minister for Health proudly announcing that a “wide ranging inquiry” into the operation of the hospital is to be undertaken, with the report to be handed to the government by the end of April, word is there are still no discussions taking place between hospital management and the surgeons in an attempt to get them back to work.
It would seem that hospital management remains stubbornly and wilfully determined to crush the surgeons in a cruel and self-serving demonstration of its power, even though it negatively impacts the health of hundreds of patients who cannot access the health care they are legitimately entitled to expect.
The Minister for Health says “We need to get to the point where everyone feels really confident that the doctors, nurses, ancillary staff, community and the local health district are all singing off the same page when it comes to getting the best outcomes for patients.”
Well Minister, we don’t know how you expect that to happen when management won’t talk to the surgeons and they are still not at work?
It has been said that the cumbersome and ineffective locum service that hospital management has put in-place is costing taxpayers as much as $15,000 a day. This failed and disgraceful waste of scarce public funds is only necessary because the hospital management is out of control and operates under a dysfunctional health management structure.
In all of this, the single most important party – the patients - have been cast aside and largely left to fend for themselves. It is a disgrace that this is the best that our so-called “professional” health service can do.
The association would argue that we as a society would not expect an inquiry to be completed into the cause of an accident before we treated its victims. So why would we not adopt the same approach with our dysfunctional hospital?
Why would hospital management, the local health board and our politicians not be doing everything they could to restore the local orthopedic services using the local surgeons to treat their own patients as a top priority to address the crisis at the SERH while their inquiries are being undertaken?
Surely the only answer to that question is that they don’t regard the health needs of hospital patients as their number one priority or responsibility.
It is the view of the association that only widespread public calls for the firing of the hospital CEO, the local health board, Andrew Constance and Brad Hazzard will create the “burning platform” necessary to compel real and lasting reform of our rotten health system.
John Richardson, BVSR&RA
Fluoridation verse
If they fluoridate water
From the tap above my kitchen sink,
I cannot offer you a drink.
The fluoride from the water tap
Could claim you in a single zap.
Pure water from a pristine stream
Is non-existent, just a dream.
Those are the words that will be said
Long after we are gone and dead.
Once other countries had a go
Then after usage all said no.
