Heat on Minister
HEALTH Minister Sarah Courtney has been accused by Labor of being missing in action as the hospital crisis rages.
Opposition health spokeswoman Sarah Lovell said Ms Courtney had not fronted the media for almost a month.
“We’ve got a Health Minister who is nowhere to be seen,” Ms Lovell said yesterday.
But Ms Courtney accused Labor of playing “politics with health” rather than having a plan of its own.
WHAT is it that they say about three strikes? It’s a relevant saying for the management of the Royal Hobart Hospital (the bureaucrats, not those hardy souls at the coalface of patient care), who over the past fortnight have come under direct and serious criticism from now three different groups of people who know they are talking about.
First we had the extraordinary evidence under oath at an inquest into a death following a suicide attempt in the emergency department in 2016. During her evidence, the hospital’s emergency medicine director Emma Huckerby warned of a crisis of culture — not capacity — at the Royal Hobart Hospital. Dr Huckerby said the opening of the hospital’s new K Block would likely do little to assist.
A day later, the hospital’s former chief of acute medicine Dr Haydn Walters issued the second warning: criticising publicly a culture of resistance to change — and saying that many of the troubled hospital’s issues were more about process than capacity. Dr Walters said numerous external reviews into the hospital had been commissioned, but the problems had not been solved: “There was a lot of burying of heads in the sand and nothing happening to make the situation better.”
MINISTER COURTNEY WAS GIVEN THE HEALTH PORTFOLIO ALMOST SIX MONTHS AGO. IT’S HIGH TIME SHE STARTED TAKING SOME ACTIONS THAT SHOW SHE IS WORKING TO FIX THESE CHALLENGES.
Fast forward 10 days and we now have our third warning — from Simon Judkins, president of the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine. He said Tasmanian hospitals had resources on par with their better-performing interstate counterparts — with the current “disaster” here relating to patient block and emergency department wait times was instead the result of a cultural issue among management. “It may be time,” he said, “to explore who is in those leadership positions and if they, in fact, the right people to oversee these vital pieces of work and culture change.”
Asked about that bold call, Health Minister Sarah Courtney simply leapt to the defence of “the staff in the hospital” — playing the old you-can’t-criticise-thenurses card. But that’s not the issue here. It’s a cop out.
The Mercury is in awe of the hard work and dedication of those junior doctors, nurses, orderlies and volunteers at that coalface in the emergency department at the Royal. But at the same time we share the view of the vast majority of Tasmanians: that we are astounded and worried at how poorly our major hospitals are performing, despite having — as Dr Judkins point out — largely equivalent per capita resourcing to the mainland hospitals.
It is now more than four months since Minister Courtney was handed the health portfolio as an attempted circuit breaker for the government — with her predecessor Michael Ferguson stuck in a political quagmire over the performance of our hospitals. Ms Courtney has now had long enough to get her feet under the desk. It’s high time she announced some big changes that might give the Tasmanian people real confidence that these problems will actually be fixed. More meetings with the very managers now thrice blamed for the crisis in our public hospitals is clearly not going to fill anyone with confidence, sadly.
Responsibility for all editorial comment is taken by the Editor, Chris Jones, Level 1, 2 Salamanca Square, Hobart, TAS, 7000