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News
Rudi Maxwell
Editorial
Sick of the spin, it’s bad for our health
Nurses: we can’t live without them. Or doctors. Or ambos. Or, for that matter, any of the staff who work at hospitals. Or enough hospital beds.
Or the rescue helicopter.
In Australia we expect a high level of medical care when we get sick.
We don’t expect to wait in corridors when we’ve been rushed to hospital in an ambulance, as I saw when I was at Lismore Base Hospital on Tuesday.
For NSW Health Minister Reba Meagher to refuse to put a start date to the much-needed new Emergency Department for the hospital when it is fit to burst like a ruptured appendix is game-playing politics at its most annoying and irresponsible.
The whole PR-managed pollie-speak of “priorities” and “key parts of planning strategy” without actual times, dates or figures is enough to make you think the BBC’s old program Yes, Minister wasn’t so much a comedy as a reality TV show and the ABC’s The Hollowmen isn’t a mockumentary but a hard-hitting documentary.
Maybe, instead of booking people for parking too long in the Lismore CBD, Council should send rangers up to Lismore Base and start booking ambulances and we can send the fines to Reba.
The deadlines you face as a journo are nothing compared to the life-or-death situations faced by health care professionals every day and their circumstances shouldn’t be made even more stressful by a massive lack of resources.
This weekend, school kids will be knocking on doors asking people to donate to help support the rescue helicopter service.
We will all need to dig deep to support this vital emergency health service because the state government has made it clear (well, as clear at it ever does when speaking in PR grab phrases of weasel words) there’s no more money under the hospital bed.
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