LEADERSHIP REQUIRES ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND

AUSTRALIAN Medical Association NT president Robert Parker could not have been more blunt in his criticism of the Chief Minister. But make no mistake – Dr Parker is far from alone in believing his government left health workers high and dry through the Omicron wave.

Desperate calls for a code brown typically are not made for political gain, but that is what Michael Gunner insinuated when he spoke about the letter written by the AMA and Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation.

It is all well and good for the Chief to believe that those calls were a “stunt”, but it is important to look back at the circumstances health workers found themselves in during the February wave. Hospitals had hundreds of patients needing treatment for Covid-19 and the Territory was seeing thousands of new cases being recorded every day.

Amid this, health workers were pulling double shifts at the Royal Darwin. That hospital had dedicated four entire wards to housing Covid-positive patients. And in an unprecedented step, it also performed what is known in the industry as a “bed buy” over an entire ward of the Darwin Private Hospital, so Covid-negative patients could be located away from the infected. Bed buys are common for one or several beds at a time at the private hospital, but an entire ward was almost extraordinary.

With this as the backdrop, it is easy to see how some may have felt a little put-out by the Chief Minister’s insistence that the health system was coping fine.

To Dr Parker, the Chief’s dismissal of their concerns showed a lack of empathy for the fact health workers were going above and beyond, and that the situation was far from normal.

And the reality is, as the southern winter approaches, we may again face another wave of Covid-19. There is no saying what variant we may have to contend with by that point, or how much strain this could put our hospitals under.

It is important at this time when the pandemic feels like it is receding, that we learn from our first true wave of Covid-19. The government needs to scrutinise itself and how it has handled the past several months and assess how it may do better.

An important lesson may be that we listen to our frontline workers, especially if they are pleading behind the scenes for action to be taken. It should not take a publicly released letter from medical bodies to get the government to listen, if it listens at all.