More muddling in healthcare reform - patient care not a priority

Hospital mergers, streamlining, improvements are hollow terms to cover up cost cutting measures that would do little to uplift the current dysfunctional hospital management. Everything is bursting at the seams and it is a wonder how we are able to cope with such a sorry state of affairs with no light in sight.

The government would rather pay generous fees to engage consultants and administrators than to improve hospital facilities and employing more staff to improve patient care. Administrators who control the budget order the cheapest but impractical inventory and equipment regardless of recommendations from professional staff. In many instances, they were proven to be "penny wise pound foolish". It costs more to undo and remedy bungles and imprudent expenditures.

Indeed, much of the well meaning advice from professionals have fallen to deaf ears and ignored for years. The result of such "reforms" would lead to even more paper work and window dressing to meet targets of the administrators but the standard of healthcare may be worse off than before.

Two things were notable: first, the professionalism, expertise and good humour of most doctors and nurses; and second, the extent to which they must work around a government bureaucracy of Soviet-style ineptitude. Their successes are in spite of the system, about which they are openly scathing.

They have prescribed the remedy to restore public hospitals to their former place among the most trusted and well run institutions in the country: to reinstate local autonomy, with independent hospital boards taking full control of the budget.

Decision-making in hospitals used to be quick and effective, but now ''funding is not spent optimally and trust, co-operation, morale and institutional loyalty has been sapped . . . Resource misallocation involving extraordinary growth in the size and cost of the bureaucracy has led to a massive waste of taxpayer's money.''

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/its-time-we-listened-to-the-doctors-20100120-mlna.html

An earlier blog posting -- don't fall sick in Australia : http://ausletters.blogspot.com/2009/11/in-australia-dont-fall-sick-if-you-cant.html