Rural doctors say small hospitals ease pain

RAMPING at the Royal Hobart Hospital would be 10 times worse if Tasmania’s smaller public hospitals were converted into aged care facilities, says the head of the Rural Doctors Association of Tasmania.

In yesterday’s Mercury, independent health analyst Martyn Goddard suggested converting some of the state’s 19 smaller regional hospitals could be converted into aged care facilities.

RDAT president Eve Merfield said rural hospitals provided both critical emergency care and other services like palliative care and pain management.

“These rural hospitals are in parts of Tasmania that we know have the poorest health outcomes and people have the most difficulty accessing health services – if anything they should be getting upgraded and improved, not converted to aged care,” she said.

“These are areas where we have trouble attracting doctors and upgrading them would make that easier.”

Dr Merfield said collectively, these smaller hospitals provided a network of 158 beds which took pressure off the state’s four major public hospitals.

“Small rural hospitals provide safe, high quality care – and they provide crucial benefits not only to rural Tasmanians, but also to the major city hospitals and urban patients by helping to reduce bed demand,” she said.

She said patients would need to stay in one of the major hospitals if these beds were lost, “causing bed block and ambulance ramping far worse than anything we are seeing at Royal Hobart Hospital”.