PUBLIC HOSPITALS across Australia are in trouble

THE CASE
It's not just the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, the Mersey Hospital in Tasmania and the Warley Hospital on Phillip Island that are dysfunctional. Across Australia the entire hospital system is in distress from years of chronic underfunding.

Here is another example - trivial - but telling.

A few months, a relative of mine, an elderly gentleman, was admitted to the medical ward of Mona Vale Hospital. This hospital is a teaching hospital situated on Sydney's affluent Northern Beaches. For medical reasons my relative was unable to swallow, so all his medication needed to be crushed for him.

There are battery operated electric medication crushers, but this hospital uses the cheaper traditional mortar and pestle, as pictured above. To my horror the nurse was using a broken pesltle, I asked her why and she told me that someone had broken it months ago, by dropping it on the hard floor.

Jokingly I said "Can't the hospital afford a new one?" and she replied, quite seriously and without any irony "No".

There are hygiene and OH&S reasons not to crush medicines with a broken mortar and pestle, but probably the most important reason is staff morale.

MY VERDICT

This is a teaching hospital! Just what are we teaching our new doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists and occupational therapists?

We cannot expect health care professionals to give us the best health care when we are not prepared to provide them with even basic, modern, good quality facilities. The pursuit of excellence does not include coping with worn-out, broken, obsolete and inappropriate equipment.

It is time to end the fiasco whereby most health care is funded by the Commonwealth through Medicare, but the hospitals are State responsibility. It is simply not working. The system fosters duplication and buck passing.