Northern Beaches Hospital: Calls for state government to control facility after it goes into receivership
The company that operates the troubled Northern Beaches Hospital has gone into receivership, prompting calls to put the facility into public hands. See what it mean for patients and staff.
NSW
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The private company that operates the troubled Northern Beaches Hospital has gone into receivership, prompting renewed calls to put the facility into public hands.
Healthscope, Australia’s second largest private hospital operator, went into in administration on Monday after a group lenders acted to secure the $1.4bn owed to them.
A syndicate of banks and hedge funds that control Healthscope’s loans placed the company into receivership after being handed control by its previous owner, Canadian asset management giant Brookfield, earlier this month.
Healthscope chief executive Tino La Spina said on Monday the move would not impact its 37 hospitals, or their staff and patients, including those at Northern Beaches Hospital.
The hospital at Frenchs Forest is in a long-term contract between Healthscope and the state government to provide public health and emergency department services on the northern beaches.
But it has been at the centre of a series of damaging medical tragedies, including the death of 22-month-old Joe Massa who attended the ED in September last year.
The boy’s death, and other tragic incidents, prompted Health Minister Ryan Park to launch a taskforce to examine the hospital’s “disastrous” public-private partnership and ways the public component of the hospital, which also offers private health services, could be run by NSW Health.
Earlier this year, Healthscope announced it wished to hand back the hospital to the public system, after the government said, in March, it would ban future public-private partnerships at acute care hospitals in NSW.
Healthscope has also previously said it was seeking to sell all its hospitals, including Northern Beaches.
At a community forum on May 15, to discuss the hospital’s future, Mr Park vowed that the state government would “do anything we can” to make sure the hospital would “come back into public hands”.
Mr Park told that forum that the government taking over the hospital would be difficult and challenging, given the complexity of the contract Healthscope signed with the previous Coalition government.
The two local independent state MPs — Michael Regan (Wakehurst) and Jacqui Scruby (Pittwater) — who organised the forum and have been constant critics of the decision to have the private company run the hospital — have renewed their calls for the state government to take over the whole facility.
Mr Regan, who pushed hard for the independent audit into the hospital that was now underway, said on Monday that they must expedite the process to bring the entire
Northern Beaches Hospital (both public and private portions) back into public hands.
The MP also wanted to reassure the community that the government was monitoring the
situation closely and frontline health services – including emergency, maternity and surgery – at the hospital would remain operational regardless of who was running Healthscope.
“This type of ongoing volatility and uncertainty demonstrates why it is completely inappropriate to have private equity running our local public hospital,” he said.
“However, I am also saying to the NSW Government, loud and clear: ‘step up and urgently end this diabolic contract’.
“If going into receivership doesn’t constitute a default under the contract, then the NSW Government needs to urgently step up and terminate the contract themselves.”
Ms Scruby said the news on Healthscope confirmed long standing concerns about the failure of the public/private hospital from both a healthcare and financial perspective.
“It is now crunch time,” she said.
“With hedge fund backers pushing for Healthscope’s’ assets to be sold, the NSW Government must seize this opportunity to buy not just the public beds, but the entire Northern Beaches Hospital.
“Northern beaches residents deserve a hospital with enough beds and services to meet the needs of our growing community, now and into the future.”
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Originally published as Northern Beaches Hospital: Calls for state government to control facility after it goes into receivership
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