REFORM MISSING FROM HEALTH ‘REFORM’ AGREEMENT

The latest health funding agreement will make no noticeable difference to the continuing crises in Tasmania’s public hospitals - unless it is used wisely.

Patients will continue to wait for unreasonable lengths of time for necessary and often urgent care. Staff will continue to work in impossible conditions, suffering burnout and disillusionment.

Overblown claims by the Prime Minister and the Tasmanian Premier will not be taken seriously by anyone familiar with our hospital system, patients and workers alike.

From the Prime Minister: “These reforms will ensure Australians can continue to access world class health care and disability supports.”

The agreement represents “a major step forward,” said the Premier.”

Both the Prime Minister’s and Premier’s statements fail to acknowledge that fundamental structural change is needed to bring the system to a state that makes them fit for their indispensable purpose.

Hospital costs are soaring and inefficiencies are evident, with a false economy on full display.

We need solutions to practices where we see too many people fronting up to the Emergency Department, when hospital avoidance programs should be investigated.

We need solutions that see wasteful practices where important diagnostic tests such as radiology scans are not being outsourced to the private sector then lost in the system, causing delayed diagnosis, as was reported in the media recently.

Official figures show that in the present state government’s first eight years in office, the cost of treating a patient in an acute ward rose by 28% and, in emergency departments, by an astonishing 40%.

We are spending almost $200 million a year on locum doctors and agency nurses because so few staff want to work in the country’s least capable and most inefficient hospital system.

Those extraordinary but avoidable costs are a major reason why the state budget is in such poor shape.

The state government thought that scrimping on hospital infrastructure would save money. The opposite is the case, because insufficient bed numbers are the main cause of inefficiency, crisis, inadequate care and rapidly-rising costs.

This agreement is an appalling lost opportunity, and the price will be paid by patients, hospital workers and the taxpayer.

Just one example of the system’s dysfunction is the extraordinary time Tasmanians in need wait for an appointment to see a surgeon, before they even go onto the official waiting list.

At the Royal Hobart Hospital, people needing urgent neurosurgery assessment have to wait for three and a half years just for that first appointment. 25% wait even longer.

For semi-urgent ear, nose and throat surgery assessment the wait is even longer: 25% wait longer than four years and four months.

People needing colonoscopy to detect bowel cancer have to wait for dangerously long periods, even though they’ve tested positive to having blood in their bowel motions.

Tasmanians are paying too much and getting too little. It is incumbent on government to create solutions and not continue with business as usual.

Unfortunately, there’s no sign of either in this agreement.