Health ‘needs 200 beds’

TASMANIAN health groups representing doctors, nurses and patients say an extra 200 hospital beds are needed statewide within the next four years to help address a crisis in the health system.

Releasing the policy paper yesterday, health policy analyst Martyn Goddard said he, along with the Royal Hobart Hospital Medical Staff Association, health unions, and the Tasmanian Patient Group, prepared the policy because “nobody’s come up with a de- LORETTALO LOHBERGERLO cent health policy to get this system back on track”.

“This is a program for the next four years. It’s not going to get us to where we need to be but it’s going to get us about halfway there,” Mr Goddard said.

“What we’re suggesting is that by the end of the next par- liamentary term we should have another 200 beds statewide, most of them in Hobart and Launceston. Eighty per cent would be top-level acute beds.”

The paper also recommends extending the Launceston General Hospital and planning for further extensions to the Royal Hobart Hospital.

Mr Goddard said Tasmania’s health crisis was the worst in the nation.

“In our capacity to deal with patients, in the number of patients we treat, every measure is well below not only where we should be but where everybody else is,” he said.

Mr Goddard said the policy’s recommendations were “entirely affordable within the money that we are given through GST for health”.

“We would be spending a little more than half of the $263 million in extra GST that this state is given this year because of our older, sicker, poorer population, rather than hiving all of that money out of health.”

Royal Hobart Hospital Medical Staff Association chairman Frank Nicklason said the policy was reasonable.

Dr Nicklason said the hospital’s 20 trainee doctors performed well in recent exams.

“We’ve got the core to do really good things if the resources are available to us,” he said.

“The Royal staff, the senior staff have achieved that in the face of really a horrific work- place that’s terrible for patients and terrible for them.”

Health Minister Michael Ferguson said the Government was acting on measures and recommendations the policy paper outlined.

“Between now and the election we’ll be outlining further measures to help achieve our bold health goals,” he said.

He said the paper proposed “ripping money out of our police or education to fund health” — a claim Mr Goddard said was a “stupid statement”.