SMALL HOSPITALS RETHINK CALL
SOME of Tasmania’s smaller public hospitals may better serve the community if converted into aged care facilities, says an independent health analyst.
Almost 70 per cent of respondents to the Mercury’s Future Tasmania survey said they did not have faith in Tasmania’s health system.
Independent health analyst Martyn Goddard said while much of the focus was on the state’s four major public hospitals, duplication of services for every community had resulted in a total of 23 across the state.
“We’ve got 19 very small hospitals which aren’t large enough to function efficiently and no government has been prepared to seriously do anything about this,” he said.
“Some of them have occupancy rates of 50-60 per cent so we need to have a serious look at whether we need to amalgamate some of those hospitals so they have the same services, but work more efficiently, or whether we need to repurpose some of them into aged care facilities.
“That’s what a lot of them are doing already – looking after elderly people and an aged care facility is a lot cheaper to run than a hospital.”
Mr Goddard said low-caseload hospitals were not only inefficient, but also potentially unsafe. “If you’ve got a small
hospital, then apart from the very simple stuff, the staff just isn’t going to have the case load to keep their skills up and that can be unsafe,” he said.
“We need to look seriously at these little district hospitals that the local community would fight tooth and nail to retain.”
Mr Goddard said Tasmania’s health system had been used for “shameful porkbarrelling” over the years, particularly in the case of Latrobe’s Mersey Community Hospital.
The Mersey became the only public hospital in the nation owned by the Commonwealth in 2007 when former prime minister John Howard flew into the state before the election to announce his government was buying it to stop it being downgraded by the Labor state government.
In April 2017, the hospital was handed back to the State Government – with a $730 million funding package from Canberra to pay for its operation over the next 10 years.
When it comes to the general provision of services, University of Tasmania demographer Lisa Denny said the private sector would determine whether there was a gap in the market, but for the public sector more planning was needed.
“Public services need to be balanced out between proximity to existing services, transport and logistics, the age profile of the area, whether it’s growing or contracting and the needs for the particular area region,” she said.