Page 3144 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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They also said that this equates to 1,500 deaths nationally, approximately the same as the road toll. This is the reason why we went for the four-hour rule and why this officer felt so compelled to tamper with almost 12,000 hospital records.
But let us look at some of the stories behind this. I would like to talk about an elderly woman whose family made representations to me and to the Chief Minister. When she presented at the hospital with a broken arm, she sat in an emergency room for upwards of 15 hours. She was finally admitted to hospital for emergency surgery, and every day for three days following that she fasted and was prepped for emergency surgery, which was always cancelled. By the time her family contacted me and the Chief Minister, she was bewildered. She was in pain. She could not sleep. Her wound had swollen so much that it became difficult to operate on. That woman spent more than seven days in hospital when she probably should have spent one or two.
There is the case of the young woman with mastitis who, with her one-week-old baby, presented and sat for 10 hours in the emergency room. Anyone in this place who has ever had mastitis, or knows anyone who does, knows how debilitating and painful that condition is. I think that woman must have extraordinary strength, because the only time I had mastitis, I could not sit up for 10 minutes, let alone 10 hours. I also know that mastitis, while it is a terrible condition, responds extraordinarily to the application of simple, common antibiotics. It is unheard of that in the 21st century, in a First World country, someone would have to be admitted to a tertiary hospital because they had mastitis. For want of early intervention, this woman sat for 10 hours and then spent two days in hospital, which a dose of antibiotics could have fixed, with early intervention.
As a mother of someone with a chronic disease, this has come into our home. My daughter last year was told to present at the hospital because she had an acute outbreak of a chronic condition that affects her health. And she was told to go to the emergency room to get admission for medical treatment in the hospital. She turned up as instructed, was seen fairly quickly and then asked to wait. Eleven-and-a-half hours later, she was admitted to hospital. In that 11½ hours, a woman with a chronic and serious chest infection sat coughing in the emergency room where there were untold numbers of people who were probably immune deficient and could have caught her disease. And we do not know how many people ended up, as a result of that, getting a lung infection that they did not need.
This is very symptomatic of the services for people with chronic disease. The 80 or 90 people in the ACT who have cystic fibrosis are treated appallingly, so appallingly that a senior official of the hospital apologised to me recently and said, “The treatment meted out to patients with cystic fibrosis in this town is appalling.” And that explains why most of the 80 or 90 people travel on a quarterly basis to Sydney to visit clinics. The clinics in Sydney provide a great example of how you treat chronic diseases and keep these people out of the hospitals, but it does not happen here. It barely happens for the children, and it does not happen for the adults.
There are myriad other stories. We heard this week of Kate Virtue. Kate Virtue approached me last week because more than two years ago she was electrocuted in the
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