Palmerston Regional Hospital cost more than $200m to build and about $60m each year to staff, but for all that cost, the fancy new building is making the provision of emergency health care in the Top End more expensive and more difficult, writes MATT CUNNINGHAM.
ACTING chief health officer Charles Pain made a startling admission at a press conference last month.
He’d been asked how many intensive care unit beds were available for coronavirus patients at Royal Darwin Hospital, as the government prepared to resume repatriation frights from Covid-ravaged India.
The answer was two.
And while the government has since been at pains to explain contingency plans if more than two beds are required, that’s still a number that should worry every Territorian.
It might also give a better indication of why those flights from India had to be paused.
It was more to do with concerns at Royal Darwin Hospital than capacity issues at Howard Springs.
The Top End’s hospital system is stretched at the best of times. But in the past few months it has been completely overwhelmed.
The emergency department at RDH has seen huge increases in alcohol-related presentations and mental health presentations.
A shortage of mental health beds has meant the emergency department has been forced to deal with psychiatric patients who should be in a secure mental health facility.
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The crisis at Royal Darwin Hospital has highlighted the chronic underfunding of the Northern Territory’s health system. But it should also redraw attention to one of the dumbest public health decisions in this country’s history.
It cost more than $200m to build the Palmerston Regional Hospital and each year it costs about $60m to staff it.
Yet, for all that cost, the fancy new building on the side of the Stuart Highway is making the provision of emergency health care in the Top End more expensive, and more difficult. Politicians scoff at this view, but it’s one held by just about every hardworking health professional who works in the Top End hospital system.
The farce of this facility was highlighted this week when it was revealed a new policy had been implemented when ambulances are ramped at RDH.
They’ve now been directed to take patients from RDH to the emergency department at Palmerston.
But if they need to be admitted to a ward, they (and accompanying staff) need to get back into another CareFlight ambulance – at a cost to the taxpayer of at least $5m over three years – and taken back to RDH.
And if they’re discharged, they’re suddenly 20km from home with no way to get there.
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Staff say the move is “stupid and dangerous”.
But it’s been forced on hospital administrators by the stupid and dangerous decision to build this white elephant in the first place.
The initial plans for a hospital in Palmerston made some sense.
It was supposed to be a small facility that could provide day surgery and rehabilitation services. But once the politicians got hold of it, it grew a life of its own.
The cost of the project more than doubled to include maternity services that remain unused and an emergency department – even though anyone with anything seriously wrong with them then has to be taken to RDH.
Clinicians want the emergency department closed and the hospital repurposed.
“One solution to some of these issues would be to close the Palmerston Regional Hospital emergency department completely and direct the money and resources back to RDH,” one said this week.
“The reason for PRH’s existence is purely political, staff morale there is poor and many staff see it as a pointless waste of money and their clinical skill and time.
“Patients use it as a free GP service, dozens a day attending with minor complaints that could be seen by GPs, meaning those attending with serious complaints such as chest pain have to wait longer to be seen and treated and anyone who needs admission is sent to RDH.
“The whole thing is pointless.”
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Another is slightly less diplomatic.
“It’s a f***ing joke,” he says.
And an expensive one at that.
But don’t expect our politicians to listen to these concerns.
There are too many votes in marginal seats at risk in Palmerston to let good public health policy triumph over politics.
You have to wonder, however, how many mental health beds might be available at RDH if we hadn’t built the Palmerston hospital?
Or how many ICU beds would there be?
There’s a good chance it would be more than two.
God forbid we ever have a serious Covid outbreak in the NT.
If we do, we might truly rue the decision to build the Palmerston hospital.
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