High radiation, broken machines: Crucial Sydney hospital service facing collapse

Doctors and patients have urged the NSW health minister to intervene before one of Sydney’s busiest hospitals loses a critical emergency and trauma service due to the latest mass resignation in the state’s public health system.

The entire team of 10 interventional radiologists at Westmead Hospital have submitted their resignations, leaving the major tertiary hospital without the service from Tuesday unless a deal is reached.

Eastwood GP Fiona Dennison wrote to Health Minister Ryan Park on Wednesday, urging him to intervene to prevent the collapse of interventional radiology services at Westmead Hospital.Credit: Monique Westermann / Getty

Interventional radiologists use ultrasound or CT to guide specialised needles and wires through small incisions, enabling them to perform procedures that would otherwise require more invasive surgeries.

They are particularly important to control bleeding in emergency and trauma cases, obtain samples for diagnoses, or to insert stents into blocked blood vessels.

“There’ll be a real hole in our service provision if we don’t have interventional radiologists,” said Dr Fred Betros, Australian Medical Association NSW vice president and a general surgeon in western Sydney.

Betros said the radiologists had repeatedly asked management to replace equipment that was 15 years old, repeatedly breaking down and exposing patients to higher levels of radiation than modern equipment.

“The dose of radiation that the staff and the patients are exposed to, it’s still a low dose, but it’s five times [that of] current equipment,” he said. “They [the doctors] are actually just fed up with working with equipment that just isn’t up to standard.”

Betros said doctors in Sydney’s west had campaigned to expand interventional radiology services to other hospitals such as Blacktown, but now patients were facing the prospect of services going backwards.

“Instead of growing the service throughout the local health district, we’re now contracting,” he said.

“We have to transfer patients from Blacktown and Auburn to Westmead … and there’s often days involved waiting to get a patient down there.

“This is just going to take what was already a really difficult situation for patient access and turn it into something impossible.”

Patients have also grown increasingly concerned about the loss of the service.

Retired Eastwood GP Fiona Dennison wrote to Health Minister Ryan Park on Wednesday urging him to commit to urgent upgrades of the hospital’s interventional radiology suite, ensure the staff did not resign, and investigate “the governance and funding issues that have led to this crisis”.

Dennison said her daughter has on four occasions relied on interventional radiology at Westmead for urgent and life-saving procedures to stem severe lung bleeding caused by her cystic fibrosis.

As a GP, she said she had also referred patients with cystic fibrosis to receive treatment by interventional radiologists at Westmead.

“The thought that patients like my daughter could lose access to such vital care is simply terrifying,” she said. “The fact that both angiography machines are over 15 years old, with only one currently functional, is unacceptable in a major metropolitan hospital.”

‘This is just going to take what was already a really difficult situation for patient access and turn it into something impossible.’

Dr Fred Betros, Australian Medical Association NSW vice president and general surgeon

Westmead doctors from specialties including surgery and cardiology, who work closely with interventional radiology on treatments and procedures, were shocked to hear of the mass resignation at a special urgent meeting of the hospital’s Medical Staff Council last week.

Two doctors not authorised to speak publicly confirmed the issue with old angiography machines had been raised.

“One unit no longer works and is being used to provide spare parts to the other breaking-down machine,” one doctor said in notes verified by another person present.

“Radiation doses from these old malfunctioning machines are extremely high, unsafe for patients and staff.”

The meeting was held less than half an hour after staff were told of the shock departure of Western Sydney Local Health District chief executive Graeme Loy, following revelations in this masthead of patients waiting up to a year for cancer diagnoses.

Park and NSW Health Secretary Susan Pearce on Wednesday met representatives from Westmead’s Medical Staff Council to discuss matters including a backlog of more than 3300 patients waiting for endoscopies that had delayed cancer diagnoses for at least 21 patients.

They also discussed issues in interventional radiology, Park told ABC Sydney radio on Thursday.

“I have not [been] happy, and neither is the secretary, with the situation at Westmead,” Park said. “There’s been a breakdown … in communication between management and clinicians that can often lead to problems, and what we’re seeing is some of those challenges play out now.”

Park did not rule out equipment upgrades, and he said he would work on a solution alongside interim chief executive Amanda Larkin, who starts in the job on Monday.

A spokesperson for Western Sydney LHD said negotiations between the public health interventional radiologists, hospital management and NSW Health were ongoing, and the service remained fully staffed and operating.

“We remain committed to working towards reaching an agreement in the best interests of our patients and staff,” they said.

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