Nicolle Flint: Government splintering the heart of the veterans’ community and community health services

DOES the Weatherill Government have a heart and does it care about South Australian communities? If the events of the past week are any guide, the answer is no.

Repat protesters Gary Owens, Jock McGowan and Augustinus Krikke on the steps of Parliament House. Picture: David Cronin

DOES the Weatherill Government have a heart and does it care about South Australian communities? If the events of the past week are any guide, the answer is no.

Last Tuesday, Health Minister Jack Snelling announced the Daw House Hospice services would be relocated. The hospice is an integral part of the Repatriation Hospital precinct, which has been dedicated to caring for returned servicemen, women and their widows for the past 70 years.

The hospice will no longer be housed in its single-storey heritage-listed building set among trees and gardens. It will now be on Level 5 of a much larger facility, with a rooftop ‘‘garden’’ for patients.

Family and friends won’t be able to park right next to it, but will have to navigate their way from a high-rise carpark. And they won’t have easy access to the Repat’s red-brick chapel with its stained-glass windows honouring wartime sacrifice.

The Weatherill Government is dividing Repat services and scattering them across Adelaide. It is splintering the heart of the veterans’ community. This community is unique, and so important it rates a mention on the hospital’s heritage-listing statement.

The Government seems intent on destroying community health services in the South-East as well. As reported in The Advertiser last week, Kingcraig Medical Centre’s 12 GPs have been locked out of the Naracoorte hospital they have served for the past 15 years.

These doctors are part of the local community. They are not locums who turn up for a short contract and then leave.

Part of the reason Naracoorte attracts so many talented GPs is because they can work in the hospital. They can apply their high-level skills as obstetricians, anaesthetists and emergency specialists .

Without obstetric services at Naracoorte, women from surrounding towns such as Kingston, Robe or Bordertown will have to travel to Mt Gambier or Adelaide, which are hundreds of kilometres away.

More and more babies will be delivered on the side of the road, quite possibly with other children in the car if a carer can’t be found at short notice.

Locking doctors out of the Naracoorte hospital doesn’t just put pregnant women and their babies at risk. It endangers anyone suffering a major heart attack, stroke or trauma. The closer you are to medical treatment, with more doctors available, the better.

That’s the point about the arrangements that have operated for the past 15 years – they save lives. They also save taxpayers money.

The Government might like to tell the SA public how it intends to balance its budget when a single locum doctor, just to keep the Naracoorte hospital open, costs 6½ times more a day than three doctors who under previous arrangements also delivered more services.

They might like to let taxpayers know how much it will cost to airlift emergency patients out of the area.

And they might like to let the public know how many mothers, babies, heart attack, stroke or trauma sufferers’ lives will be risked if they must wait hours to get to a hospital capable of treating them.

Bureaucrats have argued the Naracoorte hospital issue is a contract dispute. They undoubtedly think those protesting against the closure of the Repat are a nuisance.

The people fighting the Government’s decisions care for their communities. Unlike the Government, they have plenty of heart.