Page 207 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 November 2012
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on planning for what they are going to do with it. Let us hope we do not see bunk beds in this new Centenary hospital. But it does appear to be a pattern of incompetence in planning from this government, this genius. So the poor old taxpayer has footed the bill for $90 million. That blew out to $110, and now he is going to foot the bill for god knows what to remediate this government’s incompetence—$30 million, $40 million? Maybe the minister can tell us what it is going to be.
The hospital still is not complete. It was meant to be complete in June 2012 but it looks like being next year now. What the government did was open half of it in the lead-up to the election and come up with a new name for it, which was stage 1. The rest of the hospital is in temporary facilities. If you want a bit of an amusing read, go to the estimates inquiry of this year where we had a dispute about what was temporary and what was not temporary. The minister says, “No, it’s not a temporary facility.” Let me quote from Dr Brown, the Director-General of the Health Directorate:
There are then services that will be moving to temporary locations as part of stage 1. They include paediatric outpatients, the birthing suite, the foetal medicine unit, postnatal short stay, maternity assessment unit and maternity and gynaecology outpatients.
If the minister thinks that this is just an inconvenience for mothers, it is not; there are far greater concerns. Let me quote again from the Canberra Times:
A shortage of beds at the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children is forcing expectant mothers to be transferred to Calvary Hospital to have their babies, a senior obstetrician says.
Private obstetrician Andrew Foote said that since stage 1 of the new hospital opened in August, it had become more common for patients to be transferred to Calvary Hospital at Bruce. It now seemed to be becoming a regular occurrence. “It’s got a whole lot worse and the concern is patient safety,” Dr Foote said.
Midwives have previously expressed concern about the capacity of the new hospital.
Dr Foote said a patient had recently arrived at Centenary Hospital to have labour induced in the morning but had to be transferred to Calvary, causing a delay in the procedure.
“She didn’t actually start the drip for induction until 2pm,” which compromises safety.
“That’s our concern, that patient safety is compromised because it meant that she did not have the baby until the middle of the night when we were on skeleton staff.
“Inductions are more likely to see the baby be distressed and see an urgent caesarean. Fortunately nothing went wrong with her.”
Dr Foote said Centenary Hospital operated on a “flawed model” which assumed a significant number of women would be able to go home within 24 hours of giving birth.
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