Martyn Goddard Future Tasmania: Our hospitals are already on life support

Year after year after year of inadequate funding has produced a hospital system that is not only unable to give satisfactory care to the community but, paradoxically, is vastly less cost-effective than it was a decade ago, says MARTYN GODDARD.

ASK yourself a question: when you need the public hospital system, as you probably will now or in the future, will it be there for you?

If you have a serious and life-threatening condition, it almost certainly will. Trauma patients and people with a diagnosis of cancer or heart disease needing urgent and life-saving care are likely to get that care in time and at a high quality.

Martyn Goddard.

For anyone else, it can seem like a lottery. Anyone with a condition, however debilitating, whose treatment is not urgent is likely to be put off. They can wait for many months or years. Unless the system changes, an increasing number are unlikely ever to be treated. It is, of course, about money.

Year after year after year of inadequate funding has produced a hospital system that is not only unable to give satisfactory care to the community but, paradoxically, is vastly less cost-effective than it was a decade ago.

Treasurer Peter Gutwein has repeatedly said the hospitals can become more efficient — apparently unaware that most of the inefficiency has been caused by his own policies, or that the continuation of those policies will make things worse, not better.

When hospitals are no longer able to treat everyone, they are forced to concentrate on those patients who cannot be ignored. These are people who, in many cases, should have been treated long ago and much more cheaply, but who now have become serious and urgent cases whose care is now much more difficult and expensive.

An increasingly inadequate budget is funnelled into treating these people while less urgent cases are delayed or neglected altogether.

FUTURE TASMANIA: HEALTH SYSTEM UNABLE TO OFFER REAL CARE

Services that can keep people out of hospital altogether — community care, outpatient clinics, non-urgent and semi-urgent services — are starved of money and staff. So someone needing a hip replacement waits untreated for years. Walking becomes increasingly painful, so they remain more and more sedentary. As a result they put on weight — sometimes so much they develop diabetes.

Cholesterol and blood pressure rise, so they risk heart attack and stroke. And all the time, the pain never stops.

SHOCKING NUMBER OF PATIENTS STUCK IN EMERGENCY

Someone testing positive to the colon cancer faecal blood test may wait for three years or more for a colonoscopy to tell them whether they have cancer or not.

Our hospitals are full and have been for years. We badly need more space. But the new K-block at the Royal Hobart Hospital will remain largely empty for years because the Government won’t spend the money on staff and equipment.

At the Launceston General Hospital, the situation is even more dire. Building is urgently needed but nothing of much significance is planned.

The Health Department already has plans for a second hospital campus for Hobart at the old Repatriation Hospital site in Davey Street. The Government has put this into its 30-year wish list.

HEALTH DEPARTMENT DUMPS RAMPING DIRECTIVE

A similar second campus is also needed in Launceston, perhaps on the Newnham site being vacated by the university. Major expansion on the current hospital sites is difficult to impossible.

The GST system ensures all states an equal capacity to fund services. It takes into account the special health needs of our population. Why is it, then, that this state’s hospital system is so much worse than any other?

And what does it say about the morality of elected politicians who are knowingly responsible for such pain, loss and heartache?

Martyn Goddard is a public policy and independent health analyst based in Hobart.