Page 2590 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 15 November 1989
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I was very impressed by the basic physical plant of Calvary Hospital. It was described to me in terms of its building and plant as a Rolls Royce of a hospital. It was distressing, however, to discover that although Calvary potentially has 300 beds only about 120 are open, of which 50 are private beds. In addition, there are 20 nursing home beds. One whole floor is completely empty. Another floor, which could be a medical facility, is now an administrative and storage area and that could be described as medically empty.
One area intended for emergency crisis care is completely unused. That is quite creepy. There are about 10 beds in a great three-quarter circle, full of expensive equipment and so forth, and there they all sit. The facility for obstetrics is also greatly underused. One of the staff to whom I talked, knowing the levels of youth homelessness and the need for more nursing home beds, felt distressed that Calvary Hospital cannot be fully utilised. She was blaming no-one, and nor am I, but clearly she had a conscience on the matter.
What I saw at Calvary was obviously a well-run hospital, a place with a sense of love and peace. It was a pleasure indeed to be there. Clearly, it has a devoted staff. But there is also a sense of very great dismay in some quarters at the inability of that hospital to expand, to provide needed and comparatively reasonably priced medical facilities. I remind members of Mr Humphries' quoted price of $264 per day compared with much more inflated prices at the WVH and RCH. Having now seen and been involved to one degree or another with both the RCH and the WVH - and I do not include the John James, which I do not know really - I very seriously worry whether publicly run hospitals are being properly and efficiently run in terms of comparative costs.
I have a series of questions which I would pass onto Mr Berry. All these questions need to be addressed urgently. Why is there this problem of comparative costs? Is it to some degree overstaffing in public hospitals? Is it rather too heavy overstaffing in the areas of non-medical services, of administrative and bureaucratic services? That is certainly an impression that I have. Is it justified? Is it not so much about overstaffing as an inappropriate pyramid of too many chiefs and not enough Indians both in the administrative and medical areas? I have no figures on that, but surely that should be very carefully looked at. Is it essentially management inefficiency? Is that what needs to be dealt with, especially in public hospitals? Or could it be said that a Catholic hospital is able to call on levels of devotion and service not to be found in public hospitals? I am sure that members of public hospitals would not want that to be said, so perhaps we should discount that. All I am doing here is passing on those questions to Mr Berry as serious worries about the Government's performance in this area of public and private hospitals.
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