Labor are better at delivering health outcomes, they said. All you’ll need is your Medicare card, they said.
How’s that working out, then?
The sickest and most vulnerable children are facing the prospect of not being able to access lifesaving surgeries at one of Sydney’s major children’s hospitals as surgeons struggle to gain resources to carry out kids’ liver transplants, cardiac surgery, burns procedures and complex orthopaedic surgery amid long-term severe understaffing and underresourcing.
The Children’s Hospital at Westmead is the only facility in NSW that provides some of the most critical specialised surgeries for kids, but services are being hampered by a shortage of paediatric anaesthetists that the NSW Health Ministry has refused to rectify over several years.
How is this possible? Both NSW state and Australian federal governments are Labor. And Labor is best at health – just ask them.
Well, hey, at least they haven’t got that yucky Peter Dutton, which I’m sure is a terrific consolation for the kiddies waiting for vital surgery that will never happen.
Have they tried waving their Medicare card? That’s what Anthony Albanese told them. He’s a ‘man of his word’, remember.
Sorry, the governments are too busy having inquiries into the working groups investigating the possibility of a policy development down the track. No doubt there’s lots of talk about ‘key stakeholders’, or something.
Senior Specialist Paediatric Anaesthetists and Co-Heads of the Department of Anaesthesia at CHW, under the auspices of Westmead’s Medical Staff Council, lodged a submission to the Special Inquiry into Healthcare Funding in NSW, set up by the Minns government and awaiting publication of its final report.
The doctors described having a “close-up perspective on the wasteful impact of short-term fixes on the delivery of healthcare” in the NSW […]
Paediatric anaesthetists believe the NSW government diverts vital funds from frontline services derived from annual sums allocated to the state based on the Commonwealth National Efficient Price mechanism which is based on hospitals’ activity, to its centralised eHealth and procurement departments, and even to the Ministry of Health bureaucracy itself.
“The budgetary growth in these areas is substantial even while clinical services struggle for funds,” the doctors write.
What, Labor governments pouring every cent of taxpayer’s money they can get away with into employing more public service bureaucrats, who just happen to overwhelmingly vote Labor? I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
“In terms of what is at play in the public hospital system in NSW, it is really disastrous,” [Deborah Yates… a Cambridge University-trained respiratory physician] says. “It’s happening all over Australia, it’s happening internationally.
“As demand and costs have gone up, the administrative burden in hospitals has also gone up a huge amount, and there’s a fair amount of what I would regard as unnecessary repetition, and a lot of management strategies are really out of step with the reality of the practice of medicine.
“What is emerging are serious flaws in the system. These are things that need to be addressed and can be addressed. Governments and administrators need to take the advice of the people working within the system.
“What we need is good patient care.”
And what a Labor government needs is an army of robotically obedient, clipboard-ticking, middle-management public service bureaucrats.
Guess who they’re going to pour more money into?
