By Stefano de Pieri
OPINION
I have been writing about housing in the Mildura Rural Council, but another important issue here is the provision of efficient and accessible health services. With funding for a new hospital unlikely in the foreseeable future, we need to start thinking outside the square about how we can solve the bed shortage at the Mildura Base Public Hospital.
My question is a simple one: why can t the private and public hospitals operate as one? It just seems logical and I believe it would be a solution to the many challenges our current health services face in this region.
Sharing resources and infrastructure would also make economic sense, with – I imagine – substantial savings.
At the moment, if you are a private patient with a medical condition, you can’t just arrive at the private hospital and be admitted. You need to go through the emergency department of the public hospital and then be transferred by ambulance across the road to the private.
It just does not make any sense and it is why a lot of patients admitted to the public facility couldn’t be bothered asking to be transferred across to the private.
But if the two hospitals were integrated somehow, this inconvenience could be overcome.
I understand it is not as simple as clicking your fingers and making it happen. Many things would need to change, but my understanding is that it is very doable if both parties want to make it happen. They have expertise and experience galore.
As a member of the Mildura Health Fund and a part of this great community, I for one would encourage the discussion to be had between the two parties – and widely within the community itself, where we have people in their hundreds invested in health services, not to mentions present and future patients.
How can it hurt to at least explore the opportunities? At the moment the Base is operating daily at 100 per cent capacity, while the private is not stressed to the same extent, as far as I can tell.
The question is, why? Is it because the private hospital doesn’t have the staff to care for the patients? It would be interesting to find out and, if that were the case, my proposal makes even more sense.
Imagine being able to create a true health precinct, where people of this community had the genuine option of choosing between the private and public system..
I know people will say that that option already exists, but does it really?
I know of two people who recently needed medical care, requiring them to be admitted to hospital. It was their preference to be admitted to the private as they have been paying the health fund for decades, but they could not because the private did not have anyone who could admit them, so they had to hop back in their car to drive around the corner to the public’s emergency department and be admitted through there.
It had them question why would they bother having private health insurance if they cannot use it when they need it.
I imagine this must not be an isolated example and I think it need not happen if the powers that be get together and use their skills and goodwill to take care of the people who are their responsibility.
Having the private and the Base working together as one would create more beds, provide better care and show the government that if they are not prepared to fund a new hospital, then we will get on as a community and find our own solutions to the shortage of beds (the Base has the same number of beds as the old hospital had in Thirteenth Street 30 years ago). In the meantime, the pollies can slug it out among themselves in Spring Street.
Mildura is at the end of the track when it comes to health care and we are often on our own, so we need to create a robust system creating a private and public service under one umbrella.
We recently saw X-ray services reinstated in Ouyen and Robinvale. This appears to have happened because of the collaboration between the Base and the two other services. I know it has not been smooth sailing, but by starting the conversation two years ago, now people in Ouyen and Robinvale do not have to travel to Mildura for an X-ray, saving time and money.
My point is that communication can often lead to unexpected results, so starting a conversation in good faith costs nothing and my idea may not be as silly after all.
Something needs to happen and we are not going to get any help from anywhere anytime soon. We can petition, write letters, send delegations, change pollies or get them into a fine tizz , but nothing is going to change our reality. Taking matters into our own hands just might.
