Impasse over hospitals ‘like Hunger Games’

The NSW opposition has accused the state Coalition government of pitting Sydney’s two children’s hospitals against each other.

Sydney Children’s Hospital Randwick.

The NSW opposition has accused the state Coalition government of pitting Sydney’s two children’s hospitals against each other for essential services in a “health sector version of the Hunger Games” that is “dangerous” for patients.

Opposition health spokesman Walt Secord called on Health Minister Brad Hazzard yesterday to “drop his backdoor plan to completely remove onsite cardiac surgery from Sydney’s east”, saying the government had presided over a reduction in cardiac surgery at the Sydney Children’s Hospital at Randwick over the past six years.

“Put simply, this is dangerous,” he said.

Mr Secord’s intervention comes amid a bitter turf war over whether cardiac services should be concentrated at the Children’s Hos­pital at Westmead, in the city’s west, or also conducted at Randwick.

A leaked document reveals ­department heads at Randwick have been raising concerns about the potential loss of onsite cardiac ­surgery for more than five years — warning of an “irreversible and negative domino effect” on the hospital.

The document, presented on February 2013 to the board of the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network, which runs both hospitals, identified problems that would occur across the hospital if paedi­atric cardiac surgery were to be lost, including for trauma patients, premature babies and cancer and respiratory patients.

Implications were also raised for researchers and medical students at the neighbouring Uni­versity of NSW.

Specialists at Randwick say those concerns have still not been resolved.

On Friday night, almost 100 Randwick-based physicians and surgeons took the extraordinary step of writing an open letter to Mr Hazzard, calling for “urgent intervention” to ­address serious concerns about the “­reduction and proposed cessation of onsite cardiac surgery”.

They said a “full-time presence of paediatric cardiac surgeons” was essential for the hospital and “preventable deaths” would occur if cardiac surgery ceased, but services had been eroded and the administration had failed to provide 24/7 cover by cardiologists.

Another letter leaked to The Australian, from 2016, revealed pregnant women carrying babies with identified heart defects had been quietly transferred to Westmead, shortly before giving birth, after being cared for at the Royal Hospital for Women, on the same campus as the Randwick children’s hospital, throughout their pregnancy.

This was despite an official policy to retain cardiac surgery at both sites.

The letter, from the RHW’s department of newborn care, dated November 14, 2016 and signed by seven specialists, revealed all deliveries of infants diagnosed with transposition of the great arteries had their care transferred to Westmead.

Previously, those infants would have been managed at Randwick, the letter said.

RHW had not been advised of the change in referral practice and in some of the cases the women had been transferred to Westmead at the “last minute”.

“As you can imagine this only added to the family’s distress,” a clinical midwife consultant is quoted as saying in the letter.

A spokesman for Mr Hazzard said he had directed an independent expert to work with clinicians from both sites on a way forward and his report was being considered by the children’s hospital network board.