Hospital plan condemns us to endless health system crises

Capacity at Royal Hobart Hospital and Launceston General must double within 10 years, explains Martyn Goddard

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State Government’s hospital plans, announced yesterday, condemn this state to worsening and neverending crises in the Tasmanian health system. It’s far too little and it’s much too late.

To avoid those rolling crises, our two main public hospitals in Hobart and Launceston need the capacity to do three things: to deal with rising demand, to treat people who have been waiting for far too long, and to provide some surge capacity to deal with sudden problems like the annual flu season.

To do that, the capacity of each of those two hospitals will have to double within 10 years. That can be done.

Many of the plans exist within the Health Department. But it won’t happen because the government won’t spend the money.

Even in more normal times, this state needs about 50 more acute hospital beds a year just to keep up with rising demand.

For at least a decade, and under successive governments, these have not been delivered.

The figures on bed block — the time waited in emergency by people needing admission but for whom there are no beds — are a good guide to the trouble we are in. Of the 266 public hospitals in Australia with emergency departments, the Royal Hobart Hospital is the fifth worst, at number 261.

The Launceston General Hospital is at number 266. It’s harder to find a bed there than in any other public hospital, anywhere in Australia.

In the new building at the RHH there will be space for 250 more beds. But the government plans to open only 50 of them a year — if they can find the staff, which is doubtful. That will not be enough to stem the tide, even in Hobart.

The situation in Launceston is even more dire and is still further from being addressed. The government has promised just 32 extra beds at the LGH by 2023.

Only a fraction of the existing proposals for a new hospital campus at the Repatriation Hospital site have been announced by the government and even those, for much-needed mental health facilities, are without funding.

For the rest, to treat people with less severe conditions across the range of surgery, medicine and mental health, the government wants us to wait for another 30 years.

Can you imagine what it will be like by then?

Then there’s Launceston, the city with the nation’s most overstretched hospital. Planning for that hospital is only now beginning and — apart from that pathetically inadequate 32 beds — is also unfunded.

Instead of building urgently needed new facilities on the only available space within the Launceston General Hospital site, the government intends to give this land to a private hospital operator.

Public patients — people who can’t pay, or who have conditions that aren’t sufficiently profitable for private hospitals to be bothered with — just aren’t a priority.

Launceston, like Hobart, needs more capacity on its present site as well as a second campus for less-complex cases. When the University of Tasmania moves from its Newnham site, that opportunity will arise.

But it will need money. And because it will need money, it just won’t happen. Martyn Goddard is a public policy analyst based in Hobart.