Page 2558 - Week 08 - Thursday, 14 August 2014
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We have endeavoured to find out what is going on at the Canberra Hospital. We followed this issue up in estimates, but the answers we got were unsatisfactory. I will quote from Dr Brown at the estimates:
No, we have some work underway. Ms George might be able to speak to that in more detail. A couple of pieces of work are being looked at.
But when we go through it, we find:
We had a master plan done. It is now a more rigorous analysis of basically whether the master plan will stand up. Is the space right? Are the services able to support the design in the master plan?
They have been peddling this master plan for Canberra Hospital, and I remember seeing it. They were out there before the election, “This is the master plan. This is what TCH will look like. This is what the campus will look like.” Shiny slides, pictorials, briefings. And what do we find out, after the election? “Oh! We got it wrong. We’re not sure if we got it wrong, but essentially we’re back to square one and we’re going to move through and try and come up with progressing with preliminary sketch plans.” What is going on? It is no wonder we are in a situation where our EDs have flatlined and where our bed occupancy—that is the number of beds that are filled measured in percentage terms—is at dangerous levels.
The government used to set a target of 85 per cent bed occupancy, because that is what is considered safe. I quote from the Australian Medical Journal:
High bed-occupancy rates have been shown to be associated with greater risks of hospital-associated infection.
Indeed, we seem to be going the wrong way when it comes to staph infections in the hospital. When you look at the statistics, we have gone the wrong way:
Clinical observational data have suggested that bed occupancies above 85% could adversely affect safe, effective hospital function.
From the AMA public hospital report card:
Hospital overcrowding is the most serious cause of reduced patient safety in public hospitals and the cause of waiting times in emergency departments and for elective surgery.
Unless governments improve public hospital capacity, patient access to hospital care will not improve and patient safety will be put further at risk.
A rule of 85 per cent bed occupancy rate should apply in every hospital.
Because they the government cannot meet the figures, they change the target. The target was 85 per cent, and they decided, “Well, we can’t meet that. We’ll just change the target.” It is a pretty clever way of doing it, I suppose. It reminds me of when the elective surgery results were put out, and the health minister said, “It’s wonderful. We
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