Health: Hospital Funding

17th Jun 04

Mr ORGAN (Cunningham) (4.27 p.m.) — The government's decision to cut income tax for the well-off rather than increasing services for all Australians is coming back to bite them. Since the end of last month my local daily paper, the Illawarra Mercury, has been running stories about a bed crisis in Wollongong public hospitals. On 31 May it reported that Wollongong Hospital nurses were threatening to walk out over the issue. On 4 June it revealed that Wollongong Hospital fails to meet the New South Wales health department benchmark on bed admission in 45 per cent of cases. To top it off, yesterday it reported that on Tuesday there were no public hospital beds at all available in the Illawarra Area Health Service's Wollongong, Shellharbour or Bulli hospitals. This is a national disgrace.

Yesterday it was brought to my attention that a 72-year-old Dapto man who needs life saving surgery to treat the extreme risk of a catastrophic stoke was told last week that he will not be able to have a bed until some time in October. After intervention by his doctor and family he has now been told that he may be able to be admitted on 24 August, 2½ months from now, and he is at extreme risk of a catastrophic stroke. And I do mean he may be admitted; it cannot be guaranteed and it is highly likely that it could be cancelled. There are seven patients booked before this man who also require high dependency unit beds for post-operative care, and the Wollongong Hospital does not have enough of these high dependency unit beds. Two other people, who are also critical risk patients, were booked into Wollongong Hospital this past week for surgery but have been cancelled due to the lack of those high dependency unit beds.

What is going on here? Why aren't public hospitals in my electorate of Cunningham and those of my parliamentary colleagues the members for Throsby and Gilmore adequately resourced? Why is a 72-year-old man forced to wait a minimum of 2½ months for life saving surgery? I will tell you why—it is because the government would rather give money to the rich than provide health services for all of us. The cash-strapped public health system is collapsing around its ears, but the government is giving tax cuts to the rich. That is not just disgraceful; it is obscene. There is no excuse this government, can offer for its abject failure to provide resources to the public health system—and there is no excuse the New South Wales state government or the Illawarra Area Health Service can offer either.

Ambulance officers in New South Wales are threatening industrial action, and who could blame them? On Tuesday this week every ambulance between Helensburgh and Kiama was stuck outside Wollongong Hospital waiting for beds to become available. More than 250,000 Australians in Wollongong, Shellharbour and Kiama were left without emergency care because the government would rather give tax cuts than properly fund the public health system. And what about the 72-year-old man awaiting a bed for his life-saving surgery? How do you think he and his family feel? And how does the government think they will vote?

I think this is a real area of concern that we need to address at the national level. We have a real health crisis in Wollongong at the moment and it has been going on for some time. As I said, they have recently closed the emergency department at the Bulli Hospital and there have been ambulances queued up at the main hospital in Wollongong and people just left in corridors, basically. I heard that someone actually suffered a stroke while they were waiting to be admitted to the emergency department at Wollongong Hospital. We really need to look into the issue and provide more money to the hospital system.

There is a crisis in the Cunningham electorate and in Wollongong. A lot of it comes down to money; some of it comes down to management. I would suggest it needs to be better managed, but proper funding also needs to be available to the public hospital system so that there are plenty of doctors and staff on board and resources and beds are available to cater for these emergencies. And we are going to need more and more beds in hospitals. Just in the last couple of months, Wollongong has been overwhelmed because of the onset of winter and various other issues. This crisis is not going to go away. We need to find a solution and I think all levels of government need to work on this matter.