Warnings about patient safety at Northern Beaches Hospital ignored

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Senior doctors say warnings about compromised patient safety at the Northern Beaches Hospital have been ignored for years, as internal documents reveal a system in crisis.

Transcript

00:00We've seen documents showing that those doctors actually started complaining from before the

00:07hospital was even opened in October 2018. They were saying the model that was proposed initially

00:14was never going to work. It would be okay for elective surgeries and things like that,

00:19but for an emergency department, a very busy emergency department that would see complex

00:24and quite old patients in the catchment, it wasn't going to work because of the staffing structures.

00:31And the documents show that those kind of warnings have been consistent for eight years.

00:39It was more to do with how the public component was going to run.

00:43It was going to be okay for elective surgeries, but not for a busy emergency department.

00:49With the doctors' concerns, they're saying, yes, the hospital is facing challenges.

00:54However, all other hospitals are facing challenges and they're on par with all other hospitals

01:01and comparable in terms of their key performance indicators.

01:04It is actually, when it comes to the operation of the hospitals, it is business as usual

01:09for all the 37 hospitals that Healthscope still currently run.

01:14Now, the insolvency of the parent companies mean that receivers are going to try and find a new buyer.

01:21They already indicated that they have 10 bids.

01:24We will probably in the next few months know who is going to be the new owner of some of these hospitals.

01:30Certainly, when we talk about the public components of Northern Beaches Hospital,

01:35the state government is trying very hard, as they say, to take over that.

01:40That's a complex process.

01:42And they understand that it will require a massive financial investment to get that to work.

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