Damning verdict on RHH

Hospital overcrowding ‘costing lives of 100 patients each year’

THE state’s hospitals have enough staff to treat up to 20 per cent more patients each year — but there are not enough beds to put them in, a new report claims.

Independent health analyst Martyn Goddard has called on the Government to immediately open 300 more hospital beds in order to meet current demand — plus another 50 beds every year.

His State of Health 2020 report says more than 100 people are dying a year because of overcrowding in public hospitals.

“If the Government was crashing — through its own neglect — an airliner every 18 months or two years and killing everybody aboard, we’d take a bit of notice.

“The result is the same in terms of deaths. I think we should take some notice.

“That’s just deaths from bed block. We have the most unsafe system in the country. The most adverse events in hospital of any system by a considerable margin.

“Any government that actually cared about what was happening in these hospitals would do something about it.

“We’ve got the money to do that, we’ve got the people who can plan that and execute it.

“It requires the Government to say this is serious and it’s worth more than a press release.”

Royal Hobart Hospital

Medical Staff Association spokesman Frank Niklason said the report was another in a series of black marks against the health system.

“What staff in the hospital expect of themselves is to be able to provide safe care — and they’re in a situation where it’s just really not possible to provide the safest care and the best care, and that’s very demoralising,” he said.

“I am getting sick of it. It is hard when you can see a problem and you can see a solution and you feel like you’re talking into a void.”

However, Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation Emily Shepherd said there was cause for some optimism that change was on the way.

“There is a general feeling among our membership that they haven’t been listened to, but I think, importantly, in recent times we’ve had the Tasmanian Government come out and plug the black hole in the Tasmanian health budgets.

“We’ve also had a commitment to not reduce health services or the budget any further into the future and over the forward estimates.”

Premier Peter Gutwein rejected the criticism.

“Martyn Goddard was out a couple of years ago saying that we weren’t funding health appropriately,” he said. “He’s been manifestly proven to be incorrect, and he’s also said that we haven’t had enough nurses or enough doctors, and we actually have higher ratios than the national average.”