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September 14, 2016AMA (NSW) President, Prof Brad Frankum, says the medical staff at the South East Regional Hospital are being asked to do too much with too little.
“The South East Regional Hospital is an impressive piece of infrastructure but it still lacks many critical services that a base hospital needs.
“When it comes to health funding, building a hospital is one thing but the funding to keep the services it provides going is another thing entirely.
“When the new hospital came online, it wasn’t adequately resourced in terms of staff for a facility of its size.
“Part of that is due to the hospital not hiring enough doctors – a base hospital workload cannot be expected to be performed by a rural-hopital-sized medical staff.
“This is highlighted by the fact that there are only a handful of physicians and one locum paediatrician.
“Trying to run it as a base hospital with the staffing levels of a rural one will not provide the health services that Bega needs,” Prof Frankum said.
“A change in name does not equate to a change in services.
“We need the right number of doctors, with the right training, and the right support to ensure a stable long-term workforce supplying the region’s healthcare.
“We hope that the local area health service will enable this,” President of the Rural Doctors’ Association, Dr Emma Cunningham, said.
“Strangely, while the hospital has local doctors it can call on, management often ships in temporary locums from Canberra and Sydney.
“Meanwhile, when it does utilise the local doctors, it does not provide them with the support they would receive at a base-hospital-sized facility.
“This extends to staff to share the on-call roster as well as providing facilities like a properly resourced intensive care unit.
“This kind of ambition mixed with corner-cutting will result in a poorer standard of medical care for the people of Bega,” Prof Frankum said.
“Additionally, it makes the hospital less likely to retain existing staff and attract new people to work there.
“If you can work under better conditions in a larger city, at a better equipped and staffed hospital, doctors will leave and you won’t be able to find anyone to replace them.
“This compounds the problem rural areas have attracting medical staff.
“It needs to be added, the South East Regional Hospital is not alone in having this problem.
“Doctors in rural and regional NSW have been reporting they have similar issues to deal with at their new or recently-upgraded hospitals,” Prof Frankum said.
“I am all for the South East Regional Hospital aiming to step up to base hospital level but management is going about this the wrong way.
“Just having a new, larger hospital is not enough.
“You need to staff it appropriately and you need to ensure that it has the facilities to provide the additional services of a base hospital.
“Without that, it’s just a bigger building,” Prof Frankum said.
Media contact: Lachlan Jones 0419 402 955