The issues in health are not concentrated in this state alone - An overburdened health system is the price of living with Covid and health care across Australia and the entire world has been impacted. No doubt our hospitals need help but you can't pull nurses and doctors out of thin air. The common story I've heard from those i know in the health system say staff are burnt out from working through the pandemic and there is a massive backlog of leave requests.
From what I can tell, the Andrew's government are attempting to make things easier by reducing the elective surgery wait times in buying out these private hospitals, but the issue is a lack of staff. Even if we increased nurse pay tomorrow it wouldn't have any effect for quite some time.
It's not a choice of "have a functioning health system" OR "have a suburban rail loop". We can do both, but they're both going to take time to resolve.
All true BT but of course it so also way more complex than that. There are multiple problems of which some sit with the commonwealth and some with the states. Some also sits with the medical profession who have supported a cartel like system of controlling numbers of specialists and their training through a college system which ensures the maintenance of their incomes.
But whatever the causes the facts are that for years the Victorian public hospital system ( and other states as well) was funded to a level of survive not to a level of thrive both in terms of the amount of services and also the infrastructure available to the system. It was based on growth of 3-4% a year with some price growth as well. The commonwealth actually caps its contribution to public hospitals at 6.5% in value p.a. This is not an ALP thing or a LNP thing, I have worked in and around the system with both and they are the same. Public Hospitals are always scraping for money.
Suddenly we have a pandemic, growth in labour available stops because we have no immigration, staff absenteeism due to illness grows and we are now being asked to accomodate growth much greater than we have ever had before because of the demand for catch up and delayed care during COVID with physical capacity not built for it and actually less labour available.
The system was not set up for this level of demand, both in terms of infrastructure or labour, and a response required to meet that demand needs way more time than we have.
This is a failure of not building a resilient system which rests with all governments but it is also because we as voters and taxpayers demand that we don’t spend more than we have to. How do we think a party saying they were going to increase health spending by billions to build a resilient public system for something like a pandemic would have gone at an election?
The solution is an overhaul of the whole system which starts with training of sufficient doctors, nurses and others in the university system and in teaching hospitals, a very large increase in capacity, research and Digital health, and an overhaul of the split between the feds and the states. We also need a large increase in Medicare fees for GPs to attract doctors back to general practice and incentivise them to provide a real bulk billing alternative to hospital emergency departments.
I can tell you one thing for certain and that’s Matty Guy does not have the answers any more than Dan Andrews does.
This can only be solved in the long term by a bi-partisan approach to redesigning the system for resilience and a willingness for the feds and the states to agree to relinquishing some power. Those of us in the system don’t have high hopes that this can ever happen.
I’m sick of hearing the system is in crisis. We have a system built for one level of activity being asked to do an abnormal level of activity with little or no capability to achieve it. When we realise that we can understand that what is happening now is an entirely predictable outcome to the problems caused by the pandemic.