(SPIN) DOCTOR JOHN

If you, or a family member, have just spent long hours parked on a trolley in a hospital corridor. Or spent months waiting for so-called, elective surgery. Don’t despair. Doctor John has it all under control. In fact, Doctor John, in his capacity as Premier John Brumby, told 3AW today that Victoria’s public hospitals are comparable with the best overseas.

I kid you not. Well, I’ve visited hospitals in India, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Africa and ours are better than theirs. But ‘comparable with the best overseas’? Gimme a break.

Brumby’s hyperbole comes today because this is the day that the Federal Government took delivery of a report that could see them federalize the public health system.

Remember, during the 2007 election campaign Kevin Rudd threatened to take over the health system and said the buck stopped with him. He set up the Health and Hospitals Reform Commission and today’s report is the result.

John Brumby says a federal takeover is not only unnecessary. It won’t work.
But it’s not working now. I flashed back to late last year and these are some of the scandalous cases in this state where our hospitals are ‘comparable to the best overseas’.

A woman admitted to Emergency at St. Vincent’s at 2 o’clock one afternoon. She was there on a trolley in an area described as a ‘war zone’ for not five or ten hours but for more than two days. They finally found her a bed. And when they x-rayed her they found she had pneumonia.

A man who broke his arm playing indoor soccer on a Wednesday night. At Dandenong Hospital they pulled his hand out of his wrist to prep for an operation that didn’t happen. Didn’t happen Thursday or Friday. He was sent home with painkillers for the weekend. He spent six days with a broken arm. And this is Australia not Ethiopia.

 A cyclist rushed to hospital after an accident. I talked to him from his hospital bed where he was still waiting to have his elbow stitched 30 hours later.
A crippled woman’ diagnosed as a Category Two patient in need of a knee reconstruction. She waited for more than ninety weeks. So much for the Government’s much-vaunted 90 day guideline. According to the Opposition less than 40 per cent of Category Two patients were operated on at the Austin within 90 days over the past year.

Even a state Government report showed that more than 100,000 patients, including heart attack and stroke victims, were not treated within target times in Victorian emergency departments last year.

The AMA says hospitals are in crisis, with a third of emergency patients not being treated within 30 minutes and up to 1500 dying every year because of overcrowding. That’s about five patients a day.

Remember that survey of junior doctors last year. More than 40% thought their workload compromised patient safety and more than 70% were concerned about their own physical and mental health.

And some overworked and tired and frustrated young doctors kill themselves. According to the AMA, about one doctor has committed suicide in every state, every year, in the past three years.

I’ve said many times, that if I am a socialist about any issue, it is about health. You pay taxes, heaps of them, all your life. The one thing you should be able to expect, no bugger it, demand, is decent, speedy, affordable health care.

There are too many stories about people suffering in pain, and with total lack of privacy or dignity on trolleys in hospital corridors. Or being sent home because there is just no room at the inn. 

And if the State governments can’t fix it—then maybe the Feds should step in. Despite Dr. John’s spin-doctoring.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009