Hospital still struggles with too few beds, doctors and nurses
Nelson Hospital is struggling with not enough beds, doctors or nurses, while billions of taxpayer dollars for the healthcare system have gone into private pockets, the president of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists says.
Dr Katie Ben, a Nelson anaesthetist, spoke out at a meeting on Wednesday organised by Kaitiaki Hauora, an organisation advocating for publicly funded health care, and Patient Voice Aotearoa.
“Public health should be available for everybody who needs it, and we don’t have that at the moment,” Ben said, adding that the reason for that was “mostly staffing”.
Urology in Nelson was “falling over”, vascular surgery in Nelson had almost fallen over several times, while ICU was being held up by two clinicians on a seven-person roster and an “awful lot of locums”.
Ben said the hospital didn’t have enough beds, doctors, nurses, or enough appropriate management of emergency patients, and was “struggling”.
A patient who was due to be operated on at midnight couldn’t go to theatre because there were no beds for him, and had to spend eight hours in ED until there were discharges in the morning, she said.
Health New Zealand sent a team of senior clinicians to investigate Nelson Hospital’s issues in April last year, but since then nothing had changed, she said.
An expansion of the hospital’s bed spaces would take “at least another five years”.
It was “horrendous”, and an “absolute travesty” that billions of taxpayer dollars for the healthcare system had gone into private pockets via ACC and outsourcing.
In Nelson, that money could have “massively expanded” nursing pools, and upgraded theatres and wards, Ben said, and, once the waiting lists were dealt with, would still be in place afterwards.
Nelson Hospital was an example of the squeezed middle, where the population was growing, but the staff wasn’t, she said. Ben said she had been told by multiple people that the care in the hospital was fantastic, but getting in the door was the roadblock.
“We know GPs don’t refer us patients for secondary care because they know they’re going to get turned down,” she said.
“If we’ve got too much to do, our threshold numbers go up. So you’ve got to be sicker to get in. Other places in the country, if they don’t have those stresses or those pressures on the departments, their threshold numbers are much lower, so the postcode lottery is totally alive and well.”
Public Service Association organiser Kate Davis said low paid support workers were earning too much to get a community services card, but couldn’t afford paying $60 to go to the doctor.
“They’re looking after people while not being able to access care themselves,” she said.
Kaitiaki Hauora spokesperson Dr David Galler said the current government, more than any other previous government, had an explicit agenda to privatise healthcare.
“The answer to the problem we’ve got is to expand the public health workforce and to expand the public system.”
Co-founder of the Nelson Tasman Patient Advocacy Group Daniel Walker, who went public with his delayed cancer treatment at Nelson Hospital last year and became one of the faces of the Nelson Hospital crisis, said people felt neglected and unheard.
Patient Voice Aotearoa chair Malcolm Mulholland, who is touring the country with Galler, said they had heard very similar themes in their travels: That people couldn’t access a GP, and that hospitals were under constant and considerable strain.
Health New Zealand has been approached for comment.
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