No festive break for overworked health system

IF anyone needs a holiday over the festive season it is exhausted health workers. Yet the relentless pressure on the health system does not take a break for Christmas. If anything, problems at the state’s biggest hospital have been worse, prompting the Royal Hobart Hospital management to call a code yellow. This means there is an internal emergency because of critically low staffing levels.

Staff have been called in from annual leave to ease the load.

Any workplace tends to operate on a skeleton staff during the festive season, but the ingrained problems of staff shortages and increasing demand have pushed the system to breaking point.

Combined with a Covid spike that has increased patient numbers and pushed up staff absences, the pressure must be unbearable. That is certainly the view of one staff member who contacted the Mercury and described the health system as “absolutely broken”. She said nurses, doctors, midwives and ambulance staff were being “flogged every shift”.

Despite this, patients and parents have praised the emergency department staff for their professionalism and polite and caring treatment on a busy Christmas Day.

It is easy to be critical of the government in such circumstances and no doubt it must take ultimate responsibility for the state’s health system. In some ways extra pressure on hospitals is predictable during holiday periods when many GP clinics have limited hours and more accidents happen – often fuelled by too much Christmas cheer.

There should be well-established strategies in place to cope with that.

The federal government came to power in May with a key health promise to establish 50 new urgent care clinics to take the pressure off emergency departments. It allocated $135m in the October budget over four years. It is a start but they will not begin to come online until next year. We can only hope that makes a difference.

In the meantime, hang in there health care workers, you are doing a tremendous job.