THE PAIN OF HOSPITAL WAITING LISTS
HOSPITAL waiting lists have been a constant thorn in the side of successive health ministers for at least the past decade. The damning figures show long public hospital waits for even relatively routine investigations such as endoscopies and colonoscopies.
Urgent category-1 procedures and surgeries are meant to be dealt with within days, yet Tasmania’s record in recent years shows unacceptable delays.
Behind the statistics are real people – patients such as Bruce Sullivan, who has been waiting more than 1200 days for back surgery and faces the prospect of 600 more days before he can get the treatment needed to ease his constant pain.
That’s almost five years to address the 64-year-old Swansea resident’s ailment. It is a shocking state of affairs.
The problem with leaving a person in pain for so long, is that often the outcomes and recovery times are far worse than if they were able to receive appropriate treatment in a timely manner.
Long-term use of painkillers can and do lead to addiction, and damage other systems in the body such as the heart and kidneys. That means a patient needing a hip or knee replacement becomes a far riskier operation.
Aside from the physical deterioration, long waiting times often lead to mental health issues. Patients who would normally be getting out and about exercising and socialising often become isolated, withdrawn and depressed as their physical condition deteriorates.
Governments have promised all sorts of solutions, mostly involving increased funding and the recruitment of more specialists and health staff.
But the problems are now so ingrained that the solutions are complex and require a long-term commitment beyond four-year election cycles.
As Australian Medical Association Tasmanian president John Saul points out in today’s Mercury, the funding for medical services involves both federal and state governments and the political buck-passing on health between Canberra and Tasmania is one of the key problems.
He says the federal government needs to provide better funding to get more people on the ground.
Dr Saul believes the state government also needs to be more realistic on pay. He says recruiting more specialists, such as neurosurgeons, and other staff is difficult when pay set by the state is consistently up to 50 per cent less across some specialties, when compared with other big cities.
Once Tasmania could get away with lower pay because of our lower cost of living, but that argument is getting more and more difficult to maintain. Housing costs have skyrocketed in recent years. Rental accommodation is not only on a par with or more expensive than other Australian capital cities, but nearly impossible to find.
Tasmania’s hospital waiting lists are unacceptably long and this has been the case for some time. State and federal governments must work harder to systematically find solutions.