‘We let Joe down’: Hospitals told to listen to parents after two-year-old’s death

Doctors and nurses who treated a two-year-old boy who died at Northern Beaches hospital should have listened to his parents, NSW Health Minister Ryan Park said as he flagged greater scrutiny on the hospital’s private operators.

An investigation into the September death of Joe Massa, two months shy of his second birthday, found serious individual and systemic failures in the hospital’s management of his soaring heart rate and deteriorating condition in the hours leading up to his cardiac arrest.

Elouise and Danny Massa at their North Balgowlah home with a picture of their son Joe, whose shock death at Northern Beaches Hospital in September has left the family demanding answers.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Park said the government would urgently enact the recommendations of the review, including changing the electronic medical records system at the hospital to automatically flag when a patient’s vitals are in the “red zone”.

Park told Sydney radio on Friday morning that he would meet parents Danny and Elouise and Premier Chris Minns on Wednesday “to see if there are other things that they might want us to consider”, describing the tragedy as “a result of failing” to listen to the concerns of his parents.

“What we didn’t do was listen to the people who know their children the best, and that is their mum and their dad,” Park told 2GB’s Ben Fordham.

“The vast majority of healthcare professionals, including at that hospital, do marvellous work to service millions of patients every year. But on this occasion ... we’ve let the family down, and as a result of that, they’ve lost a beautiful baby boy, and that is something that we can never fix.”

Joe Massa died after systemic failures at Northern Beaches Hospital.

Park again criticised the decision to run the hospital under a controversial public-private partnership with Australia’s second-largest private hospital operator, but said the onus was on the government to ensure the safest care for the Northern Beaches community “while Healthscope are still operating” the facility.

“I don’t believe this is the very best model of healthcare ... but parents and the community don’t want to hear that now,” he said. “They want to hear what we’re going to try and do to fix it.”

The hospital is the subject of an investigation by the NSW auditor-general, examining whether it “efficiently and effectively” delivers public hospital services and quality care. The audit will focus on the emergency department and general surgery, and is expected to be finished by mid-year.

On Friday afternoon, federal member for Mackellar, Sophie Scamps called for Northern Beaches Hospital to be “returned to public hands”, saying the public private partnership was a “failed experiment” and that “public health and private profit-making are fundamentally incompatible.”

Scamps said the state government needed to intervene urgently to end the partnership.

“Public hospitals must be publicly run to serve our community, not to make profits for corporations,” she said.

But blaming the privatisation of the hospital for the incident was “a stretch too far”, shadow health spokesperson Kellie Sloane said.

“I think the parents deserve answers, and it’s incumbent upon us to investigate everything thoroughly,” Sloane told 2GB on Thursday.

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