Closing hospitals

Hill Dweller

So Minister, lets have a list of hospitals that will either be downgraded and then closed so we can at least get started with the placards.

THE program instituted by the Health Department to have a series of public consultations about the use of district hospitals around Tasmania is the first step in their closure.

The first step will be to reduce the District Hospitals to a District community health facility, and then as use drops off, they will all be closed.

A simple but effective strategy by the DHHS, that has been endorsed by the Minister Giddings.

District Hospitals presently suffer from poor DHHS management ranging for staffing to capital upgrades. The DHHS have ignored the views of GPs in country areas for years and see GPs as being a problem that will go away when the Hospital gets closed. It is a strange public sector view of the Health Market, where they think that by closing the Hospital it then solves a problem of having to fund part of a GP in a country town.

Even Local Government has been dragged into funding rural doctors as the DHHS seems rather incompetant and far too slow to react to needs.

So the latest and smartest thing the DHHS has decided to do, is to just close the District Hospitals so that they can solve a budget problem.

I suggest to you that this type of action is anti-community and anti-Tasmanian and is just the sort of thing that we do not need as a policy decision.

Perhaps the Minister should start looking at her Head Office staffing first for cuts. If 100 DHHS Staff are retrenched, then there is not a need to close the district hospitals and it would make no difference to the delivery of health care to the population of Tasmania, which after all is the primary use of the tax money in the first place.

Probably an easier decision than taking away resources from communities where the resourcing is poor in the first place.

So Minister, lets have a list of hospitals that will either be downgraded and then closed so we can at least get started with the placards.

Hill Dweller
Sandy Bay