Tell me this isn’t a Victorian Labor government. The state is drowning in debt, clogged with massive infrastructure projects that are years behind and tens of billions of dollars over schedule, a steadily downgraded credit rating and a hospital system in near-terminal crisis.
This is the state, after all, that spent half-a-billion dollars building a quarantine facility, that’s only ever housed tumbleweeds, and brand-new hospitals that stand empty of patients or doctors while people are literally dying on stretchers in the corridors of its other hospitals: hospitals where emergency patients are treated in tents in car-parks.
The worst hospital in this third-world hell-hole of a state is Mildura Base Hospital, were emergency patients regularly wait over 24 hours to be seen, if they don’t die first.
Official Health Department data reveals that from January to March, more than three per cent of Mildura Hospital patients spent more than 24 hours in the emergency department, eight times the statewide average.
Linda Romeo is mourning the loss of her mother, Maria, who died on March 19 following a six-hour wait on an ambulance stretcher in a corridor of Mildura Hospital’s emergency department. The 85-year-old was breathless and having a suspected heart attack when she arrived at the hospital at around 11.30am.
In the sort of scene that we thought we’d left behind with the Covid madness, bureaucratic pettifogging meant that Linda Romeo never got to see her mother before she died. An administration staff member refused to let her see her mother until she’d been moved to a bed, which took hours, by which time Romeo had had to go home to look after her grandchildren. Maria Romero died before her daughter was able to see her.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye or even say I loved her,” she said. “I am so angry. I don’t blame the doctors or nurses, they need more beds. I feel like deep down this could have been avoided, this is why it hurts so much. She didn’t get the care she needed.”
Doctors are just as frustrated.
Dr Peter Milne, a vascular surgeon who has worked in Mildura for 20 years and now solely consults in its private hospital, said one of his patients spent six hours sitting in a chair in Mildura Hospital’s emergency department in January while suffering from septicaemia, a life-threatening infection in the bloodstream.
Milne had phoned the hospital to request that his patient receive intravenous antibiotics after a blood test he had ordered showed all the hallmark signs of septicaemia. He requested that staff call an ambulance so that the patient could be swiftly transferred to Melbourne.
“This was a life-or-death situation,” he said. “When I phoned back six hours later he was still sitting in a chair in a corridor and hadn’t received antibiotics because they can’t put a drip in a person while they are sitting. There were no available trolleys or beds.”
Milne ended up phoning for an ambulance himself. It was only when the patient was on a stretcher in an ambulance on its way to Melbourne that he finally received the critical antibiotics.
The Age has been informed of another incident where a palliative patient died from a brain tumour in the emergency department because there was no room for them in the hospital wards. In another case, a teenager with an infected hand waited for 75 hours before discharging himself.
As Dr Milne points out, the blame lies squarely with the state government. Mildura Hospital had previously operated as a public hospital under private contract. In 2020, the state Labor government took full control.
A leaked document obtained by the Age lays bare the extensive delays, revealing that up to 100 patients spend between 24 to 48 hours in the hospital’s emergency department every month, with some experiencing waits of more than 48 hours. In April, 90 patients waited between 24 and 48 hours, while nine patients waited more than 48 hours.
But, hey, at least Dan stopped Covid – or so Victorians are still kidding themselves.
How’s that working out for them?
