DOCTORS REFORM SOCIETY
15-Feb-10
OUR PATIENTS WILL NOT NOTICE OPPOSITION’S HOSPITALS PLAN
“The announcement today by the Federal Opposition that it would set up community
controlled hospital boards for major public hospitals just in NSW and Queensland will not
address the major problems affecting public hospitals throughout Australia,”
said Dr Tim
Woodruff, President of the Doctors Reform Society.
“Mr Abbott has come up with a
simplistic, back to the 50s approach which denies the obvious problems of federal under
funding, the negative impact of the PHI rebate on our hospitals, transfer of costs to public
hospitals because of privatisation of Aged Care and decimation of the GP workforce -
most
of which occurred under Mr Abbotts former stewardship as health Minister."
“Public hospitals are under-resourced and competing for doctors with the publicly subsidised
private hospitals,”
said Dr Woodruff. “The Federal Government’s share of funding to public
hospitals fell from about 50% to 40% under Mr Abbott’s time as Health Minister, and until
the Federal Government shares the cost burden equally with the States, all public hospitals
will continue to struggle.”
“There is no doubt that hospital and health department bureaucracies are part of the problem
but trying
to provide services without resources is very challenging for the best hospital
administrators. Whilst more input from doctors and other health professionals is necessary,”
said Dr Woodruff, “replacing bureaucrats with a local hospital board is a return to the 1950s,
when hospitals were much simpler organisations. The suggestion that the provision of a board
will make a hospital accountable ignores the complexity of a modern hospital and ignores the
appalling lack of reliable data which would be required for community representatives to
have meaningful input.”
“Without addressing funding and data, this plan from a former health minister will change
little and patients will continue to wait and suffer unnecessarily” said Dr Woodruff.
“Meanwhile,
under current Federal Government
policies (which continue the privatisation
initiatives of Mr Abbott’s former government) their richer fellow citizens will continue to
jump the queues by going to the publicly subsidised private hospital next door where the
doctors who could be working in the public system are now working.”
Dr Tim Woodruff
Dr Con Costa
President
Vice President
Doctors Reform Society
Ph 0418400309
Ph 0401042619
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