Repat closure: Former senior doctor at Flinders warns system won’t cope
A FORMER department head at Flinders Medical Centre warns there is medical gridlock ahead for the hospital because it is unlikely to cope with the demand when the Repatriation General Hospital closes.
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A FORMER department head at Flinders Medical Centre warns there is medical gridlock ahead for the hospital because it is unlikely to cope with the demand when the Repatriation General Hospital closes.
Flinders University Emeritus Professor Warren Jones, the former head of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at FMC, said FMC regularly diverted patients to the Repat and sometimes had queues of ambulances in the carpark as patients waited for a bed in the Emergency Department.
SA Health has rejected the claims as scaremongering and said efficiencies under Transforming Health and the reallocation of Repat beds elsewhere would ensure the system coped.
Prof Jones’s warning followed revelations by The Advertiser that the new Royal Adelaide Hospital would not use all its beds, including 12 intensive care beds, when it opened next year.
The State Government said the new hospital was bigger than the existing RAH and had been built to cope with growth in demand so would not initially need all its 700 overnight and 100 day beds.
Prof Jones collated publicly available figures that show the Repat handled about 140,000 outpatient services and performed 1341 orthopedic operations, 1353 urological operations, 604 general operations and 665 plastic procedures in 2013-14.
“Where and how will this workload be accommodated?” he said. “Certainly not at FMC, contrary to the optimistic assertions in Transforming Health.”
Prof Jones said that in May this year there were 148 transfers from FMC to the Repat, which he said served as a “safety valve” when FMC was overloaded.
“That represents 1800 transfers a year — where will they all go when the Repat shuts?” he said.
“We must be wary of the validity of the data on which Transforming Health proposals have been based — there were major inaccuracies in the data used to justify the originally planned closures of the FMC Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and the ED at Noarlunga.”
Clinical Ambassador for Transforming Health Professor Dorothy Keefe said Prof Jones was “scaremongering”.
“In the decade since he retired things have changed in the system quite considerably,” she said.
“We have more acute beds in the system than most states, we do more procedures but have longer lengths of stay.
“If we do things Transforming Health is planning to do in terms of bringing the length of stay down to a better level, not doing procedures that are not needed, getting people in and out in a timely manner and not having people stay overnight we will free up an enormous amount of beds.”
Prof Keefe said freeing up beds would reduce the need for FMC to rely on the Repat for overflow patients during peak demand.
She also predicted reforms to outpatient services, and having people who lived outside the region attend a nearby hospital rather than FMC, would deal with the Repat’s annual 140,000 outpatient load.